The Intruders jg-6

by Stephen Coonts

  “We’re all right. Both of us are in our rafts, uninjured, and the rafts are lashed together.”

  Jake had his radio out by this time and heard a calm voice say, “We’ll get planes off at dawn to look for you. You guys check in after sunrise about every fifteen minutes, okay?”

  “Roger that. Keep the coffee hot.”

  Jake Grafton spoke up. “Black Eagle, tell the Ops guys that they need to arm the planes. If anybody shoots at them, they need to defend themselves vigorously.”

  “I’ll pass that along. Wait one while I talk to the ship on the other radio.”

  They sat in the darkness with their radios in their hands. Finally the radio came back to life. “Five Zero Eight Alpha, just how sure are you that you were actually shot at? Is there any way the hydraulic failure could have been a coincidence?”

  The question infuriated Grafton. “I’ve been shot at before,” he roared into the radio. “I’ve been shot at and missed and shot at and hit. You tell those stupid bastards on the ship that we were shot down.”

  “Roger. You guys hang tough. Talk to you again fifteen minutes after sunrise.”

  His anger kept Jake warm for about five minutes. Then he was just cold and tired. With every stitch they wore sopping wet, Jake and Flap huddled in their rafts and shivered. After a time their thirst got the better of them and Flap broke out his two baby bottles full of water. He passed one to Jake, who drank it quickly, afraid he might spill it.

  The moon rose higher and gave more light, when it wasn’t obscured by clouds.

  Eventually, despite the conditions, exhaustion claimed them and they dozed. Jake’s mind wandered feverishly. Faces from the past talked to him — Callie, his parents, Tiger Cole, Morgan McPherson — yet he couldn’t understand what they were saying. Just when he thought he was getting the message, the faces faded and he was half-asleep in a bobbing raft, wet and cold and very miserable.

  Occasionally they talked. Once Jake asked Flap, “If that attack last month against the Russians had been real, do you think we would have made it?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Think we would have hit the cruiser?”

  “Maybe.”

  “They said it was eighty percent probable.”

  “I say maybe. I don’t do numbers.”

  “I think we would be dead.”

  “Maybe,” Flap said.

  Time passed too slowly, every minute seemed like an hour. The temptation to call Black Eagle to see if he was still up there was very strong and hard to resist. Jake got his radio out twice. Each time he stowed it without turning it on. He might need all the juice in those batteries tomorrow. Wasting battery power now would be stupid.

  The worsening sea state brought them fully and completely awake. The swells were bigger and the wind was stronger.

  At the top of each swell the rafts pitched dangerously, forcing each man to hang on tightly to keep from being thrown out. They made sure they still had a lanyard attached to each raft.

  They had been hanging on to their seats in their frail craft for an eternity when Flap said, “You shouldn’t have called the heavies stupid bastards.”

  “I know.”

  “Someone will ream you out when we get back.”

  “Gives me something to look forward to.”

  Gradually they became aware that the sky was lightening up. Dawn. It was coming.

  Incredibly, the wind strengthened and began to rip spindrift from the swells. Jake reeled in his helmet — it had fallen overboard at some point during the night — dumped out the water and put it on. He ran the clear visor down to keep the salt spray out of his eyes.

  It worked. Incredibly, his head was also warmer. He should have been wearing this thing all night!

  “Put on your helmet,” he shouted at Flap, who had his tucked under his thighs.

  The clouds were just beginning to show pink when they saw the ship. It was almost bows on and coming this way. A little ship, one stack, coming with a bone in its teeth.

  Jake pointed.

  “Of all the fucking luck!” Flap Le Beau swore.

  It was the pirate ship.

  21

  “They‘ve seen us,” Flap shouted over the wind. “They‘re coming this way.”

  “Better ditch the guns and radios,” Jake told him. He drew the Colt .45 from its holster under his life jacket and survival vest and slipped it over the side. In a holster sewn inside a pocket of his survival vest he had a five-shot Smith & Wesson .38 with a two-inch barrel that he kept loaded with flares. He ditched that too.

  The radio — he held on to the radio for a moment as he watched the bow wave of the oncoming small ship subside. They were stopping.

  Son of a…

  He used his survival knife to cut the parachute shroud line that tied him to the radio and lowered it to the water, then released it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Flap slip his .45 over the side.

  “The knife,” Flap told him. “Dump it too. They’ll just take them away from us.” Jake opened his hand and the knife made a tiny splash.

  The small ship drifted to a stop on the windward side of the two rafts, about fifteen feet away. Her bulk created a sheltered lee. It was a nice display of seamanship, but Jake and Flap were in no mood to appreciate it.

  Staring down from the rail were eight brown faces. Malays, from the look of them. They held assault rifles in their hands.

  The sides of this little ship had once been blue, but now the blue was heavily spotted with rust. Where some of the paint had peeled glimpses of gray were visible. Apparently she had once been a patrol boat. Forward of the bow was a gun mount, now empty. That was where they had had the twenty millimeter. It must be stowed below.

  The men on deck lowered a net and made gestures with their rifles. Jake and Flap slowly paddled over. Flap went up the net first. Jake followed him. The ship was rocking heavily in the swells. The net was wet, hard to grasp firmly. His foot slipped on the wet cordage and he almost went into the sea. When he was clear of the raft the people on deck began shooting bursts of fully automatic fire. He looked down. Holes popped everywhere on the inflated portions of the rafts and spray flew.

  By the time he pulled himself up enough to grasp the rail, the rafts were completely deflated and sinking.

  Hands grabbed him and pulled. He scrambled on up the net. As he was coming over the rail, someone hit him in the helmet with a rifle butt and he sprawled onto the deck. Flap was already lying there on his back looking upward.

  Most of the crew were barefoot. A couple of them looked like teenagers. Their clothes were ragged and dirty. There was nothing half-assed about their weapons however, worn AK-47s without a fleck of rust. Several of them had pistols stuck into their belts or the tops of their pants.

  One of them gestured toward a ladder with the barrel of his weapon. Up. Jake glanced at Flap. His face was expressionless. Grafton prayed that he looked at least half that calm.

  At the top of the ladder was the bridge.

  The man working the helm and engine was a bit larger than medium height, apparently fit, and had a wicked scar on his chin. The ship was already gathering speed and heeling in a turn. The captain, if captain he was, glanced at them, then concentrated on putting the ship on the course he wanted. When he had the helm amidships and had checked the compass, he said, “Gentlemen, welcome aboard.”

  Jake looked around. Two of the crew were behind them and the rifles were leveled at his and Flap’s backs. He turned back to the captain.

  “Take off all that…” He gestured toward their life jackets and survival vests. “And the helmets. You look very silly in those helmets.”

  Jake and Flap unsnapped their torso harnesses and let them fall into the puddle that was spreading away from each man. They got rid of the G-suits and helmets. Jake took off his empty shoulder holster and dropped it into the pile.

  “Where’s the pistol?”

  Jake shrugged.

  The captain took one step and slap
ped him, quickly and lightly. He stood with his hands on his hips in front of Jake, looking up at him. “I think you will answer my questions. Where is the pistol?”

  “In the ocean.”

  The captain went back to the wheel and checked the compass. “And your survival radios? Where are they?”

  “Same place.”

  “Where did you fly from?”

  “USS Columbia.”

  “Where is she?”

  “West of here.” He toyed with the idea of lying for less than a heartbeat. “Maybe two or three hundred miles now.”

  “When will the planes come looking for you?”

  “Shortly.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime soon. After the sun comes up.”

  “My men must learn to shoot better. Now we have this complication.”

  “Must be a tough way to make a living.”

  The captain continued as if he hadn’t heard. “The question is, do we need you alive? You disposed of your radios so you cannot talk to the airplanes on UHF. You could have warned them that you would die if they attacked us. Alas, we have only a marine band radio. It’s a pity.”

  “You speak English pretty well.”

  The captain was scanning the ocean and glancing occasionally at the sky. He didn’t bother looking at the two Americans. “But I do not think they will attack. They will look us over and take many pictures. That is all.” His eyes flicked to their faces. “What do you think?”

  Unfortunately Jake thought he was right. He tried to keep his face deadpan but his turmoil probably showed. The captain apparently thought so. He said something to the guards and waved his hand. They prodded the aviators in the back and turned them around. As they left the bridge, Jake saw one of the crewmen opening the pockets of the survival vest and dumping the contents on the deck.

  They were shoved into a tiny compartment below the main deck. There was a large hasp on the door.

  “Can we have some water?” Jake asked the three men who pushed him inside right behind Flap. They ignored him.

  The door swung shut and they heard the padlock snapping closed. The compartment was only slightly larger than a bedroom closet and had apparently been used for storage. There was no light and no electrical sockets, although there was one small, filthy porthole that admitted subdued light.

  Flap leaned against the door and listened. After a bit he shrugged. “They’ve gone, I think.”

  “Maybe there’s a bug.”

  “Go ahead and look for it, James Bond.”

  Jake sat against a wall and began taking off his boots. He took off his socks and wrung the water out, then put them back on. “They’ll probably shoot us after a while,” he said.

  “Probably,” Flap agreed. He also sat. “The captain ain’t sure if he’ll need us or not. The bastard has it figured pretty good. I’ll bet he can get this thing to port before the U.S. Navy can get a surface ship here to board him. He thinks so too. But he’s saving us just in case.”

  “What do you think they did with the freighter?”

  “Sank her would be my bet. They were probably off-loading high-value items when we showed up.”

  “And the crew?”

  Flap shrugged.

  “Then why in hell did these guys shoot at us?”

  “Perhaps someone panicked. Or they didn’t want their picture taken. The airplane overhead was a problem they hadn’t figured on.”

  “So you think this is some kind of local industry?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, look at it. Here we are on the southern coast of Sumatra, about the most out-of-the-way corner of the earth it’s possible to imagine. In among these islands we’re well off the shipping lanes, which go through the Sunda Strait or the Strait of Malacca. So these dudes from a local village sail out into the shipping lanes, board a ship — probably at night when only one or two people are on watch on the bridge — then bring it here and loot it. They probably kill everyone aboard and scuttle the ship. The high-value items from the cargo that can’t be traced eventually end up in the bazaars in Singapore or Rangoon or even Mombasa. The ship never shows up at its destination and no one knows what happened to it. Say they knock off one ship a year, or one every two years. Be a nice little racket if they don’t pull it too often and get the insurance companies in a tizzy.”

  “But someone got off fifteen seconds of an SOS and we came to look.”

  “To look and take pictures. They probably thought they had killed everyone on that ship, then the SOS burned their eardrums. They should have disabled the radio but they didn’t. One mistake led to another. So instead of waiting to loot the ship after dark, they decided to try it in daylight. Then we showed up. You know as well as I do that a good photo interpreter could identify this ship sooner or later. The captain knows that too. So he fired when we gave him a golden opportunity. I’ll bet he was the bastard at the trigger.”

  “He’s going to get photographed again today.”

  “But the victim isn’t tied up alongside. Now this is just a little ship going about its business in a great big ocean.”

  Jake merely grunted. After a bit he said, “It doesn’t figure.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “That ship they stopped is an old freighter. Looked to me like a Liberty ship. Eight to ten thousand tons, no more than that. Why didn’t these guys stop a big container ship? All the valuable electronic stuff gets shipped in sealed containers these days.”

  “Beats me.” Flap sat and removed his boots and socks. After a while he said, “The bastards could at least have given us water. I’m really thirsty.”

  He had his boots back on when he said, “Did you notice the captain’s hands? The calluses on the edges of his palms? He’s a karate expert. If you had even flinched when he slapped you he might have broken your neck.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  “You did fine. Handled it well. Be submissive and don’t give them the slightest reason to think you might fight back.”

  “I’m certainly not going to strap on a karate expert.”

  Flap snorted. “They’re the easiest to beat. They’re too self-confident.”

  Jake didn’t think that comment worth a reply. He retrieved his cigarettes from his flight suit shoulder pocket and carefully removed each one from the pack, trying not to tear the wet paper. He laid them out to dry. Then he rolled onto his side and tried to stretch out. The compartment was too small. At least his ass wasn’t submerged.

  A bullet in the head or chest wasn’t a cheery prospect. All these months of planning for the future and now it looked as if there would be no future. Strange how life works, how precarious it is. Right now he wanted water, food and a cigarette. If he got those, then he would want a hot bath and dry clothes. Then a bunk. The wants would keep multiplying, and sooner or later he would be staring at a bulkhead and fretting about insubstantial things, like what the next ready room movie was going to be, his brush with death shoved back into some dark corner in the attic of his mind.

  He had faced death before in the air and on the ground, so he knew how it worked. If you survived you had to keep on living — that was a law, like gravity. If you died — well, that was that. Those left behind had to keep on living.

  Maybe in the great scheme of things it really didn’t matter very much whether these two blobs of living tissue called Jake Grafton and Flap Le Beau died here or someplace else, died today or next week or in thirty or fifty years. The world would keep on turning, life for everyone else would go on, human history would run exactly the same course either way.

  It mattered to Jake, of course. He didn’t want to die. Now or any other time. Presumably Flap felt the same way.

  Fuck these pirates! Fuck these assholes! Murdering and stealing without a thought or care for anyone else. If they get theirs, life is good.

  As he thought about the pirates Jake Grafton was swept by a cold fury that dro
ve the lethargy from him.

  He sat up and looked at Flap, who had also curled up on the deck. He wasn’t asleep either. “We gotta figure out a way to screw these guys good.”

  Flap didn’t smile. “Any suggestions?”

  “Well, if they shoot us, we sure as hell ought to take a couple of them with us. I don’t think they’ll shoot us in here. Blood and bullet holes would be hard to explain if this ship were ever searched. I figure they’ll take us topside, tie a chain around us and put us over the side. Maybe shoot us first.”

  “And…?”

  “If we could kill a couple of the bastards we ought to give it a try.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t give me that shit!”

  “What’s a couple more or less?”

  “You’d let them shoot you without a struggle?”

  “Not if I have a choice. I’m going to take a lot of killing. But if they want us dead we’re going to end up dead, sooner or later.”

  “That’s my point. When I go to meet the devil I want to go in a crowd.”

  Flap chuckled. It was a chuckle without mirth. “What I can’t figure out, Grafton, is why the hell you joined the Navy instead of the Marines.”

  “The Navy is more high-toned.”

  They sat talking for most of an hour, trying to plan a course of action that would kill at least one and hopefully two pirates.

  Flap could kill two men in two seconds with his bare hands, Jake assumed, so it seemed that the only real chance they had was for him to cause enough commotion to give Flap those two seconds. He didn’t state this premise, however Flap let it go unchallenged. They hadn’t a chance of surviving, not against assault weapons. But if their captors relaxed, if only for an instant…

  When they finally ceased talking, both men were so tired they were almost instantly asleep, curled around each other on the deck because there was no room to stretch out and rocked by the motion of the ship.

  About an hour later a jet going over woke them. The thunder of the engines faded, then increased in volume. Then it faded completely and they were left with just the sounds of the ship. The plane did not come back.