Without warning

by John Birmingham

  Caitlin snickered despite the seriousness of the situation. ‘Okay. You got any floor plans?’

  Rolland removed a set of drawings from a plastic tube. ‘There has been some remodelling of the property in the last five years,’ he explained. ‘These were lodged with the city archives. I had a devil’s job getting them.’

  ‘Yeah, but God bless continental bureaucracy,’ said Caitlin. ‘Now, what’ve we got here?’

  They scoped out the plans of the house across the street by torchlight on a foldout card table, in a windowless room on the second floor of their own building. It looked like it may have been used as a storeroom until recently. A few cardboard packing boxes, folded flat, remained.

  The target property was not so different from the one in which they stood. Same number of floors, and a similar layout of rooms, save for the ground floor, which had been opened up into one vast living space. It was not bomb-damaged either, as far as they could tell.

  ‘This will be very hard,’ said Rolland, ‘getting them alive.’

  Caitlin nodded. ‘Like a hostage situation, where the hostage doesn’t want to come with. And he’s armed.’

  ‘We would normally train in a mock-up facility first. But there is no time.’

  ‘You could let me go in on my own,’ she offered. ‘I’m renowned as a sneaky bitch, you know.’

  ‘You are renowned as an assassin, Caitlin. I have no doubt you could make it inside. But perhaps only you would come out, non?

  ‘Perhaps,’ she conceded. ‘But I could make it easier for you.’

  ‘How so?’

  Caitlin explained what she would need, and although the plan was crazy, to his credit, Rolland heard her out.

  When she was finished she folded her arms and shrugged. ‘Captain, it is the only way I can think of to kick down the doors, kill everyone who needs killing, and maybe, just maybe, keep Baumer and Lacan in one piece.’

  Rolland pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger, a gesture she had already recognised as his giveaway. He was thinking of betting the pot.

  * * * *

  47

  MV AUSSIE RULES, SOUTH PACIFIC OCEAN

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake…’

  ‘I am sorry, Captain, but the storm, it put much stress on the engines, yes, much stress on everything, and this can be repaired but it will take time.’

  Julianne examined the length of black steel-mesh tubing that was going to kill them all. It was less than an inch thick and just a foot long and it carried coolant to one of the Aussie Rules’s twin 1492-horsepower Caterpillar engines. Or rather, it would have were it not disconnected and dangling uselessly, having blown as a result of running at maximum pressure for way too long. Her Sri Lankan chief engineer shook his head sadly, as though betrayed by his wife.

  ‘How much time do you need to fix this, Pankesh?’ asked Jules. ‘The truth. Don’t underestimate the difficulty’

  ‘It is a very specialised fitting, ma’am,’ he said as his two Dutch offsiders crowded in behind him, both of them looking equally despondent. ‘Three hours, minimum. Possibly up to five. You can run the other engine at half power, but that is all.’

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Her temples were throbbing. They had a break of twenty nautical miles on the Viarsa 1, but their pursuers would eat that distance up in two hours. They were going to have to fight.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, standing up and turning away from the mess of spilled coolant. The engine room gleamed as white as ever, but it was eerily still with the power plant shut down. ‘All three of you will work on this as fast as you have ever worked on anything in your fucking lives. Got me? Maybe you’ll perform miracles. First, though, each of you get to the armoury and draw yourself a weapon. If they board us, we’ll need every hand we have – except for you, Pankesh. You keep working here. You don’t stop until one of them comes through that door, understood?’

  The Sri Lankan’s frightened eyes were comically wide as he bobbed his head up and down.

  ‘Rohan, Urvan,’ she went on, ‘when I give the call to repel boarders, you’ll have to down tools here and come help out on deck? You understand that?’

  The Dutchmen were both in their thirties, veterans of North Sea oil-rig tenders, who’d been stranded in Ecuador by the collapse of the airline carrying them home from a sex tour of Bangkok. They nodded and tried to look resolute, but she could tell neither of them wanted to leave the relative security of the engine room.

  ‘All right, everyone. Get your weapons, then get back to work. If you can pull a miracle out of your arses we won’t have to fight.’

  She moved from one handhold to the next, negotiating an exit with the engineers on her tail. They’d left the storm behind twelve hours ago, but the sea was still a vista of churning, mountainous waves. At least it would make any boarding difficult. When the Dutchmen headed aft to the gym-turned-armoury, she hurried as best she could up to the main lounge, where she found Shah and Birendra engaged in the interminable process of teaching her passengers how to kill. She held on to the doorway to steady herself and beckoned Shah over when she caught his eye. He moved with fluid grace across the pitching deck, barely needing to check himself against the movement of the ship.

  ‘Yes, Miss Julianne? The engines, they are down?’

  ‘Yeah, and I don’t think we’re getting them back any time soon. How’re your pupils going, Mr Shah?’

  ‘They do well, miss,’ the Gurkha replied. ‘Some of the Americans have guns at home. Moorhouse the banker hunts with a shotgun – I think we should arm him with one. The others should take the M16s. They are A2 models, quite reliable. We have seventeen of them and three thousand rounds of ammunition. I would suggest creating three fire teams. Pieraro can watch over one, two of my men will take the others. Volume of fire, Miss Julianne, that will be crucial.’

  Jules had to agree. Even the Yanks, who may have had pistol club or hunting experience, would never have shot at another human being – and crucially, would never have been shot at. The decks were still heaving all over the place, and she knew from personal experience that firing from one unstable platform at another usually meant missing your target. Sergeant Shah was right: best to just throw up a wall of lead.

  ‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘Your guys and Miguel will need to run those teams, otherwise we’ll fire off all of our ammo and hit nothing but waves and sky. What about the crew and your chaps? What’s happening with them?’

  Shah looked behind him to where Corporal Birendra was instructing the Mexican children in how to reload an M16 magazine. He was making a game of it, laughing and clapping along as they pushed the rounds in. Jules shook her head sadly. What a sight.

  ‘We have spent much time on this, Miss Julianne,’ the sergeant assured her. ‘I will lead the reaction force. We will have the heavy weapons, including the rocket launchers. Three RPG7s and eight warheads, deployed from the upper decks. Depending on how the enemy attempts to effect their boarding, we shall use them to interrupt the assault or interdict any heavy-weapon crews on the Viarsa 1.’

  ‘Fifi’s gonna be pissed off,’ replied Jules with a smile. ‘She loves rocket launchers.’

  ‘Miss Fifi will lead the fire team composed of crew members. She will also suppress any heavy-weapons fire from the Viarsa with her machine-gun. The crew I have divided up according to their levels of competence. She will take the best of them as a reserve, holding the pool deck and providing cover over the aft sections. If needed, they have been trained to split into two sections, one to hold the pool level and the other to be deployed as needed.’

  ‘Okay. Sounds like a plan,’ agreed Jules, slightly encouraged.

  ‘What about those kids, though? I’m really not comfortable having children in the thick of it.’

  Shah shook his head, frowning gravely. ‘It is a bad business, Miss Julianne. But unavoidable. They cannot run away, not in this sea state, and they are very useful. Birendra has trained them well to load and to clear blockages. They
know to keep their heads down. And Miss, remember too, they are not spoilt little brats – they are village children, from the edge of the desert. They have all worked from their earliest days, and their lives have been hard, sometimes violent. They will be scared, but I think they will endure the battle more calmly than some of the others.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘I know what you’re talking about, Sergeant. I’m really worried about some of my bigger dilettantes just going to pieces.’

  The deck dipped sharply as they slid over another crest. One of the kids that Birendra was teaching rolled himself into a ball and tumbled across the thick woollen carpet in the empty lounge, squealing with laughter.

  ‘Now roll back, roll back, little yeti!’ called out Birendra.

  Jules had to admire his patience. She found the children a challenge and was more than happy to have as little to do with them as possible.

  ‘How long until we are intercepted?’ asked Shah.

  ‘Two to three hours, depending on how hard we can push the second engine. I don’t want to blow it too, though. If we get stuck without any propulsion at all, we’re royally buggered.’

  ‘Then I shall take all of the civilians outside for a live fire exercise,’ the Gurkha said. ‘It would be best if they hear the guns before the real shooting starts.’

  ‘Yes, it would be,’ agreed Jules. ‘Who knows, it might even put off our chasers.’

  * * * *

  It didn’t, but the live fire did give her some hope and, she supposed, her charges too. Sergeant Shah gathered everyone on the boat deck at the stern and had them fire off three rounds. One individually; one in their fire teams; and one en masse. It was the latter that gave everyone some heart. Shah had assembled quite an armoury for the yacht and the roar of so many guns firing all at once was more than impressive – it was actually frightening. The youngest children, who would be having nothing to do with the fight, as agreed, were all herded inside during the exercise, but it was still loud enough to upset them. Quite a few of the adults, too, Julianne thought.

  But when the single crack of thunder had dissipated on the strong ocean breeze, what remained were forty-one people, most of whom were grinning like fools.

  ‘Bring it on!’ yelled Fifi, leaping onto a diving locker and waving her ass at the small dot of the pursuing vessel. ‘You want some of this? Come and get it, baby!’

  The younger members of the crew laughed and grinned, and some of the Mexican village boys began smacking their own behinds and crying out ‘Brinning on, si! Brinning on!’

  ‘Maybe we should be the pirates,’ said the Rhino, who stood beside Jules on the pool deck, above the display. He was wearing a side arm for the first time and his eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark aviator glasses. His face was flushed, but Jules couldn’t smell any rum on his breath. He was smoking, of course.

  ‘How long, Rhino?’

  ‘Less than an hour.’

  Julianne shaded her eyes against the sun and stared at the dark shape closing with them from astern. It was about twice the size it had been when last she checked.

  * * * *

  First blood went to Fifi. As the Viarsa 1, a red-hulled 2000-tonne former toothfish poacher, muscled through a seven-metre swell to put itself within a few hundred metres of the Rules, Fifi lay under a tarpaulin on the pool deck, tented to allow her spent cartridges to eject, with only the barrel of her Russian tripod-mounted machine gun poking out. Shah had deployed everyone to their fighting positions and then ordered them to remain under cover. The Aussie Rules appeared deserted as it wallowed about under reduced power.

  Fifi took her time, adjusting to the relative rise and fall of the two vessels. With the Viarsa 1 coming up astern, she had a clear view of the vessel’s foredeck and bridge. She had intended to unload a magazine into the wheelhouse, hopefully cutting down some of the more important crew members, but as the distance between hunter and prey collapsed, an infinitely more tempting target presented itself. At least a dozen men, all armed, began to gather near the bow of the Viarsa, pointing at the super-yacht and occasionally firing the odd random shot.

  Fifi waited in her little tent, patiently tracking the closely grouped cluster of men with her sights. Three times she imagined squeezing off a burst – but she held her fire, waiting to see what the arrhythmic dance of the two ships did to her aim. Once, as the Rules fell hard a-port into a boiling black trench, she would’ve missed completely. The second and third times, however, were fine.

  On the fourth occasion that the two ships lined up, she was ready. The battered, rusting trawler had pulled to within two hundred metres. The boarding party had stopped firing, possibly at the behest of a large bearded man who had just rushed down onto the deck. He was yelling and gesticulating, obviously warning them to move away. The eerie quiet of the Rules, the complete lack of any movement on deck, had apparently unnerved him. The poacher heaved itself over a line of black swell, shot through with streaks of dirty foam, just as the Rules began to climb a wall of water large enough to steady the yacht’s ceaseless tossing from side to side. For three precious seconds, while the trawler slid down the face of the wave behind, Fifi enjoyed a relatively stable platform and an exposed, slow-moving target as the shooters headed back inside with great difficulty.

  She breathed out and squeezed the trigger.

  The PKM began its harsh industrial jackhammering and lines of tracer arced out across the ocean to kiss the bow of the Viarsa 1. She had a 200-round box mag loaded with Russian-standard 7.62 rifled cartridge and tracer. The long, whipping line of light ribboned across the gap between the ships almost instantly and tore the men apart. She fired in three separate bursts, as hot spent casings bounced off the tented tarpaulin and stung her whenever they touched exposed flesh. Only two of her prey survived. The bearded man who had rushed onto the deck to warn his comrades of the danger they faced, and another who dived for cover as soon as her first target disintegrated in a shower of blood and body pieces.

  She noticed a twinkling light on the roof of the wheelhouse and rolled off her perch a split second before the tarpaulin was chewed to pieces by the line of return fire.

  … whump whump…

  Two lines of grey smoke reached out for the Viarsa’s twinkling star, which disappeared inside twin explosions as the rocket-propelled grenades detonated, taking out the machine-gun. Fifi heard another snarling burst of automatic fire and wondered whether Shah or one of his men had also targeted the bridge, as she had intended to. Belly-crawling to her next firing station, where Dietmar waited with a fresh box of ammunition, she didn’t dare put her head up to look.

  The Rules was now taking fire from the length of the trawler.

  * * * *

  Sergeant Narayan Shah, formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Gurkha Rifles, had disposed of his resources very well. Five independent fire teams, providing coverage for the length of the super-yacht, with the least experienced or reliable provided with the best cover.

  Peering at the Viarsa 1, he had to wonder who was running things over there. As soon as Fifi had opened up on the fo’c’sle, more men had emerged from the rear of the wheelhouse and begun to spread out on the aft decks, taking cover here and there, and firing in an uncoordinated, indiscriminate fashion. Stupid fishermen, he thought again. His teams, all run by his own men or Pieraro, worked in concert and directed their fire onto specific targets.

  ‘Blue barrels, aft,’ he called out, and his shooters sent a torrent of gunfire into the rear of the ship, where two men had just popped up and started firing at the bridge of the Aussie Rules. One of the targets flipped over backwards as a dark fan of blood painted the white crane nearby. The other dropped straight down and didn’t reappear.

  Puffs of smoke appeared and the occasional tracer zapped across, punching into the aluminium skin of the yacht with a terrible clang.

  ‘Smoke stack, aft,’ Shah called out again, sending a lethal stream of automatic-weapons fire across the gulf between the ships. A distance, he
noted, that was narrowing rapidly.

  * * * *

  Armed with her trusted shotgun, Jules crouched in the entrance to the bridge, watching Mr Lee as he hunkered down and attempted to steer them away from the Viarsa 1 with only limited power. He was also handicapped by having to keep his head below the line of the windows lest he get shot. Dozens of rounds had already smashed through the glass and wounded the Rhino, who was bleeding heavily from one arm, cursing up a storm and puffing rapidly on a new Davidoff.

  ‘Apologies, Miss Julianne,’ Lee cried out, as the whole ship rang like an iron bell.

  The other vessel had just struck them broadside.

  In her headset, Fifi’s voice came through. ‘Here they come, Julesy. Lots of them.’

  ‘On my way.’