by Alex Archer
She had looked for a vessel with captain and crew of the poor but honest class. Captain Delgado and his crew were a tough-looking bunch, to be sure. But nowhere on earth did the sea coddle weaklings. The ocean was big and powerful and heedless, and would swallow you without a trace for the slightest lapse in caution or judgment, or just on general principles.
The conclusion they’d come to was obvious from their whispered conversations. Who else but some kind of secret agent would hire them to transport her and an inflatable powerboat loaded with electronic gear to the middle of nowhere?
And that’s where she was. Squarely in nowhere’s midsection. In the dark, the little junk, whose captain was reluctant to display running lights, quickly vanished. Annja was left all alone with the warm thick air pressing against her face, the smell of the salt sea and the petroleum engine, the growl of the outboard and the gurgle of the wake, and an entire sky full of stars.
Before setting out she learned that the moon, in its half phase, wasn’t supposed to rise in this part of the world until around 2:00 a.m. She guessed that would be the outside limit of the envelope in which Wira, bless his reckless heart, would make his move. Heaven knew what kind of radar or night-vision equipment the obviously well-capitalized Eddie Cao Cao had to equip his pirate fleet, or at least his flagship, the Sea Scorpion. But there was no point in the Rimba Perak navy making things easy on the pirates by allowing the waning moon to illuminate them.
So Annja steered the boat, frequently checked her headings against her GPS navigator, and tried not to dwell on how completely foolhardy this whole thing was. She had brought an emergency kit, a shortwave radio and some flares, in case she just got utterly lost. She knew if the storm caught her out here in the open sea they’d do her no good.
She didn’t fear totally missing her objective. Much. Even though one thing she didn’t have out here on her ridiculously tiny and remarkably fragile seeming boat was a means to track the transmitter she’d snuck into the crate with the coffin. After all, unless events veered wildly off course, her target was going to make itself, or be made about as obvious as it was possible to be.
Still, it caught Annja by surprise when the night flamed up before her. Out of nowhere the sky a few points off her port bow lit with a gigantic yellow flash. It was followed by two more, in rapid succession. Then an orange fireball rolled into the sky, and all kinds of lights began flashing. Tracer rounds arced gracefully. The sound of the first blast rolled over her like a wave, overpressure so powerful she felt it on her face.
It was an impressive sound-and-light show. “Yes!” she exclaimed, pumping her fist. It had all come together as she planned.
Then it struck her hard she was heading into the midst of that floating inferno.
“That’s why I get paid the big bucks,” she muttered, and cranked up the engine.
She made no attempt at stealth—speed was the plan. With all the flashing going on, to accompany the banging, and the orange and yellow flames billowing up already from a pair of junks, a small boat on the water was going to be obvious for anyone who cared to look. The kicker was, why would anyone bother to look for a random small boat? There were plenty of big, well-armed boats to look at instead.
Much more likely was that accidental gunfire would wipe her out.
What she was witnessing was like the biggest, best fireworks show ever. It was so utterly unlike anything she had experienced that she actually felt little fear heading into it.
She had seen sea battles before, on television and in movie theaters. But there had always been that wall of separation. Even in old footage from World War II, when those were real guns shooting and the flashes when the shells hit were tearing apart and incinerating real human beings, it had always been something happening a long time ago and far, far away and in all events on the far side of that uncrossable glass wall. It may have been real once; it wasn’t real now. But the lights and noise and even smells that surrounded her, swallowed her, were so overwhelming they seemed a different kind of unreality.
A pair of banshee shadows screamed overhead, low enough to rock her boat with their air-wake. They had to be Rimba Perak jets. She passed within a few hundred yards of a seventy-foot junk afire to the waterline, with orange flames bursting up higher than it was long, underlighting an enormous coil of black smoke squeezing into the sky. She smelled burning fuel oil and barbecue. She knew way too well what that meant, and suddenly it was very real.
Panic rose inside her. She could barely breathe. The sudden massive adrenaline dump, combined with the smell of burning human flesh, overwhelmed her. She vomited over the side of the Zodiac.
Mostly.
When she finished Annja unscrewed the top of a water bottle, rinsed her mouth, spat. “Okay,” she said, “I’m officially in deep now.”
The only thing for it, clearly, was to plunge on even deeper. Because she was Annja Creed. And also because she’d feel like a total fool if she turned the Zodiac around and scuttled back into the middle of the ocean.
29
The battle itself exploded.
In an instant, it seemed, Annja found herself surrounded by ships churning the seas with ghostly wakes; raking up lines of spouts with heavy automatic weapons and geysers from misses by rockets, bombs or cannon shells. She had no idea exactly what sort of ordnance was going off. But there was surely a lot of it.
Ships blazed up with light. She saw huge muzzle flashes light the sky like sheet lightning. Explosions flashed, dazzling white. Flames rushed skyward like demons escaping hell.
There had been about twenty vessels in the Red Hand pirate fleet when last Annja saw the overhead imaging in Wira’s study. The Rimba Perak navy had brought ten to twelve surface craft to the party. There was a mix of coastal-patrol vessels ranging in size from mere armed speedboats to Singapore-made bruisers, over fifty meters long and packing 76 mm guns, 30 mm machine cannons, and ship-killing missiles, along with the land-based Harrier attack jets. Though the Red Hand probably outnumbered the Rimba Perak forces in terms of manpower as well as hulls, the superior firepower and discipline of Wira’s men would tip the balance in their favor.
The explosions made the air seem solid. Sometimes it quivered all around her, as if she were trapped in clear gelatin. Other times it just banged on her like big sheets of boiler plate. She felt fear that the sheer high-energy, high-intensity sound produced by the vast quantities of explosives going off all around could permanently damage her brain, destroy her physical coordination or even her ability to focus her thoughts.
Yet she had no thought of going back. Once focused on her goal, she moved toward it inexorably. She would only alter course if a better one suggested itself. Anyway, she was well and truly in the middle of things here. The way back was as at least as hazardous as the way ahead.
She steered around a piece of flaming wreckage that appeared to be the remains of a lifeboat. A small boat with Rimba Perak’s green, gold and red pennants fluttering from its stern sped within a hundred yards to starboard, its twin guns raking a junk on the other side of it. An RPG flashed in its stern, setting off its fuel in a yellow fireball that flew straight up in the sky as the boat lost way. A burst of heavy automatic-cannon fire ripped the air above Annja, making her duck her head reflexively between her shoulders.
From the moment she had started to form the whole deranged scheme in her mind, listening to Wira and Purnoma and the sinister, lovely Lestari in the Sultan’s study the night before, Annja had wondered how she was going to be sure which ship was her target. She had operated on the assumption that it would be pointed out to her in one or more of a number of ways.
So it proved. Just as she started to fear she could never escape the hell boiling over on all sides of her—that if a stray bomb or bullet didn’t wipe her off the planet, a ship churning along at top speed would blindly run her down—she saw a big junk ahead, just starboard of her bow, steaming full speed away from the dogfight. It showed no lights. Nor, more significantly, did
it show any sign of gunfire.
It didn’t stay dark for long. Enormous spotlights pinned the junk like horizontal pillars of blue-white light. One of the big corvettes and a patrol craft half its size pursued to port and starboard, converging like sharks.
The junk dwarfed both. It was huge for a wooden ship. It must have been two hundred feet long, its sharply raked stern and bow rising improbably high against the black sky. Annja thought it must have immense engines to thrust it over the waves so rapidly, raising a big green self-luminous wake. Fast as it was, though, it was no match for the two sleek, modern Sultanate craft.
The junk’s deck sparkled with muzzle flashes like a Chinese New Year parade. RPGs buzzed from it to flash against its pursuers’ sloped armor, or hiss harmlessly into the swell. The Rimba Perak ships only returned fire with machine guns and Mauser machine cannon, instead of their missile racks or 76-mm deck guns. That in itself told Annja the fleeing ship must be the Sea Scorpion. And it must be carrying the coffin.
Unless all it’s carrying is the transmitter, she remembered with a jolt of dismay. She turned her inflatable boat’s prow toward it and pushed on at top speed.
In the general battle the grief was not all going one way. The pirates fought back with everything they had, big thudding .50-calibers and buzzing, sparking swarms of RPGs, as well as a constant hailstorm rattle of small arms. Off her starboard quarter Annja saw the long low shape of a Rimba Perak cutter ablaze from knife prow to stern. Even as she watched its magazine erupted in a colossal blast shot through with pulsating flame and flickering flashes as minor munitions cooked off. It broke in two and began sinking, with a hissing audible even above the cosmic racket of the battle, below the waves.
Ahead, the two Sultanate ships closed with the big junk. Annja saw what she thought were grapnel lines arcing toward the fleeing vessel. The pursuing ships came in right under the junk’s looming counters. Men began to swarm up the lines and scale the sheer wooden sides of the hull. Grenades flash-cracked on deck. Assault rifles flared. Annja bit her lip as commandos dropped to the waves like dark fruit.
Wira! she thought. He would certainly be among the first to board.
She broke clear of the battle. It actually seemed strange not to be surrounded by volcanic upheavals of fire and noise. The big junk had lost way; she was gaining on it. Her heart sped up.
Sirens hooted from the Rimba Perak ships. They cast off or cut the lines holding them fast to the junk, which now lay dead in the water and was beginning to drift counterclockwise. The big corvette, which Annja felt certain was Wira’s flagship, swung the huge blinding white eye of its searchlight around.
Directly toward Annja.
But no, the beam did not strike her. It shone almost directly back over her head. At the same time the corvette’s machine-cannon opened fire. Red tracers lanced above her with sky-ripping noise.
She turned her head. A hundred-foot-long junk was bearing down on her. The Rimba Perak searchlight lit its crimson forecastle and the staring eyes painted on either side of the bow like a stage.
Annja’s Zodiac moved faster. She was in no danger of being run down. But she saw faces, bleached pallid in the multimillion-candlepower beam, staring at her. Arms pointed right at her.
Kalashnikovs began to wink orange fire at her from the rail. Bullets kicked up little spurts of water all around her small craft. A heavy machine gun raked the water toward her, its thumb-sized bullets sending up water spouts as high as a house.
Annja watched in helpless fascination. Absently she tried to keep steering straight for the Sea Scorpion. The risk of being run down by the Rimba Perak warships, or plowing into the junk’s squared-off stern, seemed the least of Annja’s worries.
Above and to the right of the onrushing junk, a star caught Annja’s eye. With everything else going on—all of it with a whole lot more immediate significance for her personal survival than astronomical phenomena—she wasn’t sure why.
Then she realized it was getting larger and brighter. Rapidly.
The junk’s whole stern blew up in a flash that lit the sky white from horizon to horizon. Annja saw debris, shattered planks and what she thought were twisting human bodies flying skyward in a pillar of yellow flame. With a whistling roar the Harrier jet that had launched the guided missile flashed over Annja’s boat. The doomed junk, engine shattered, its tall stern enveloped in a fireball, began to fall away to its own portside.
Annja looked forward. The Rimba Perak naval craft had sheered off on diverging courses. She guessed they were intent on preventing pirate craft from coming to their leader’s aid. Not that any seemed eager to do so, especially after the abrupt fate of the one ship that tried. A quick glance back showed the battle spreading out, as if the pirate fleet’s survivors were scattering like a covey of frightened quail.
The Sea Scorpion’s stern loomed above her like a dark wooden cliff. She throttled back. The Zodiac’s hard nose nuzzled the big ship to the starboard of its huge wooden rudder like an amorous dolphin.
She reached into her seabag for her grapnel gun. I’m getting to be an old pro at this, she thought, and brought it to her shoulder.
ANNJA WASN’T SURPRISED to find no one guarding the stern. Several still bodies lay about the deck, which was slick with blood and hazardous from bushels of empty shell casings, tinkling like tiny brass chimes as they rolled in shoals to and fro as the ship moved with the waves. Since both sides favored dark clothing for nocturnal operations, she had no idea who the dead were. Shouts and shots came from up ahead, seemingly up out of the hold.
She picked her way carefully forward to avoid slipping on the spent casings. Then she froze and ducked down in the shelter of a yard-tall coil of cable as thick as her arm.
Men were clambering over the starboard rail. Dark-clad men with dark masks hiding their faces. They carried suppressed machine pistols. Sword hilts with cross-shaped guards jutted above each man’s shoulder.
“Oh, dear,” Annja said softly. Somehow, the Knights of the Risen Savior had joined the party.
The sloping deck offered plenty of cover for Annja to sneak forward. The Knights seemed focused single-mindedly on the noisy battle raging belowdecks. They showed no interest in securing the top deck.
Moving from hiding point to hiding point Annja found a hatch. It opened into darkness. She reached down, felt until she found a ladder. Then she climbed down, closing the hatch after her.
Black enfolded her. Her eyes adjusted slowly after the flash and flare of the naval battle. She reached tentative hands out to explore as her surroundings came dimly into view. She found herself in a world of closely fitted planking, a narrow gangway with a low overhead.
It smelled better than Annja had expected the inside of a notorious pirate vessel to smell. Apparently Eddie Cao Cao insisted on certain standards aboard his flagship. Assuming that was really where she was, of course.
That didn’t mean it smelled good. She could detect stale sweat, bilge water, diesel oil, burned lubricants, various forms of mildew and mold. She also smelled disinfectant and layer upon ancient layer of varnish.
Yellow light spilling beneath a doorway ahead faintly lit the gangway. The noise of combat came from beyond it. Sword in hand Annja crept cautiously forward.
It was like being inside a living thing. Ships move. Not just in terms of rolling and pitching and yawing in response to the vast irresistible motions of the sea. But internally, flexing, shifting.
A big wooden ship did so much more than a metal one. It was Annja’s first time on board such a ship, of such a size, on the open sea. All around her the junk shifted and creaked and groaned.
There was one thing she did not feel or hear—the throb of big nautical engines. Apparently either the pirates had shut them down, or the invaders had shut them off for them.
Listening at the door did little more than confirm that fighting was going on close by. Possibly right on the door’s other side. She reached for the rope latch, pulled the door open enough
to peek through.
A number of stacked crates and objects swathed in gray or blue plastic tarps stood stacked left and right. The space beyond them opened up into a large hold with a kind of gallery or walkway running around it. Lamps hanging from the overhead lit it badly.
There was no mistaking the crate containing the coffin in the hold’s center. All around it men fought.
Dark-clad fighters pressed in from both sides, the Rimba Perak commandos from Annja’s left, the Knights from the right. A knot of pirates was being forced back upon the crate. Only a handful remained. But they were fighting hard. Annja saw Knights and commandos die as well as pirates.
For whatever reason the shooting and grenades had been dropped in favor of hand-to-hand combat. Most likely everyone, pirates included, feared damaging the precious artifact they battled over.
Annja smiled slightly. Maybe Wira wasn’t so eager to send it to the bottom, after all, she thought.
She could make out little more. A pair of pirates crouched before her, backs to her, in the passageway between the crates.
She saw him then—Wira. At first she didn’t recognize him. Like his men he wore indigo battle dress, although his long hair was confined by a midnight head-rag like one of the pirates. Her heart jumped in her chest. He waded into the enemy ahead of his men, laying about with his sword. A huge pirate with an even bigger bare belly swung an outsize battle-ax at him. He ducked the blow, slashed the man across the shins. The pirate screamed, bent to clutch at himself. Wira split his shaven skull.
A tall figure dressed in a scarlet tunic stepped forward. He carried a pair of butterfly swords, single-edged weapons with metal knuckle-bows and short, heavy blades almost like cleavers. He had a square, handsome face and neatly trimmed black hair and beard. He called something in a commanding voice.
The pirates disengaged and drew back against the crate. The fighting stopped. Apparently both Knights and commandos were willing to wait and see how events proceeded.