by Chuck Dixon
“You all do as we say, and everyone goes home to their families. Nee lee-ow-jee wo ma?” Boats said, finishing in tortured Cantonese.
The second and radioman nodded once more and stepped through the hatch onto the weather deck and were gone into the night.
Lee and Shan continued their search for the remaining gunhands, one or two, still on the loose aboard the floating platform. They felt rather than heard the tug sliding into place against the aft dock. The powerful bow lights mounted in the front of the boat beamed into the shed interior throwing shadows everywhere.
They stuck together, covering each other’s backs and their surroundings in a three-sixty arc. Both men were aware that they were very probably under the eyes of hostiles. Scattered debris along the interior decks offered enough cover for a platoon. The catwalks and superstructure that crossed high above made for perfect roosts for a sniper or snipers.
“I wish I knew how many fuckers we’re looking for,” Lee said. He had to shout to be heard over the growing gale howling through the platform.
“A straight foot is not afraid of a crooked shoe,” Shan said.
“Is that some ancient Chinese wisdom?”
“Something that my mother used to say. I do not know why I think of it now.”
“What’s it mean?”
“I never dared asked her. My mother was not a woman to be questioned.”
“That’s great, Shan.”
“Did your mother offer you any wisdom?”
“Yeah. She told me never to get involved with a woman who didn’t like dogs.”
Gang Zhou, soaked to the skin through his BDUs, belly-crawled along the narrow shelf that ran just under the flat sheet awning that covered the top of Dex-Tan 11’s port wall.
He was deaf from the pelting rain hammering the steel inches above his head. He kept eyes on the pair of men, Americans probably, walking the deck far below.
They could wait.
The more important target was the boat approaching the stern section on course for the docking bay. It only followed that these soldiers had taken control of the tug as well as the platform. If they had not, they would soon attempt to do so. Their objective was obviously to move the D-T 11 to another location, to steal it. Why, Gang did not know. He only knew that he had to stop them. It was more than a question of loyalty. It was also a matter of survival. The men below had killed his brother guards. They would not allow him to live.
He would live. He was ex-special forces. A wolf warrior. An army of one. At twenty-eight years old he was in his prime, a natural killer of men. He only joined this private army for the promise of action. In the PLA, he was a warrior without a war. And Gang dreamed of combat.
Moving with stealth, he lowered himself from the shelf to a catwalk that ran athwart the shed building. He took care not to strike any of the support structure with the barrel of the rifle slung from his back. The catwalk was exposed to the sky and slick with running rainfall. Gang waited until the two soldiers had moved past below him before moving low along the catwalk to where it crossed a central joist that ran from the open end of the shed back to where the glare of the tug’s spotlights was turning night to day.
With his rifle cradled in the crooks of his elbows, he crawled on his knees along the broad steel beam toward the source of the light. He came to rest short of a gap in the stern wall where the top of the wall came to a stop six feet from the eave of the awning that ran along the wall’s top. He was concealed in shadows with a clear field of fire at the tug’s front deck and superstructure.
Gang sighted over the top of the scope mounted atop his rifle. He swept the front deck where he could see two crewmen securing bulky lines that led to cleats set on the D-T 11’s dock. They were unarmed in jeans and work shirts plastered to their bodies by the downfall. They were not targets. He swept the front sight upward.
The lights inside of the tug’s bridge illuminated the interior. Even through the wavering haze of rainfall, he could see figures moving in the cabin. Three men. Two were large men.
He popped the lens caps from the scope and held his eye close to the cup to look through the lenses.
The bridge loomed in his view. The distance made the image flat. The three figures moved as if on the stage of a puppet show. A big man with a beard stood at the wheel. He wore body armor over a diving suit. A rifle rested atop a console within reach. A soldier. Gang moved the scope view to his left and was surprised to see a negro, also in body armor and armed with a black rifle. The third figure was a Chinese. That man looked out through the rain-streaked glass gloomily. Probably the captain.
The sailors on the front deck finished their task of fastening the two vessels together. They hobbled along the canting deck back toward the bridge. Gang needed to act before they returned indoors and into his killing zone.
He settled into a prone position; the rifle steadied by his left arm. He chose his target, lining up on the negro first. He held the reticle firm on the pane of glass at the front of the bridge. The target rose and fell slightly, the black man rising into view then dropping beneath the crosshairs before rising again. Gang timed the rhythm, anticipating when the man would surge up again into his lens for a center mass shot.
Down he went. Up he came. Gang rested his finger on the trigger and drew in a lungful of air. Down. Up.
He let out the air slowly through pursed lips, eye locked on the target. Lungs empty and nerves rock steady, he waited. Down. Up. The negro climbed into view, the crosshairs fixed, for a half second, on his chest.
Gang squeezed the trigger home. The rifle bucked into his shoulder. He brought the rifle back down on target. As he did so, a frisson of tension swarmed up his body. This was not the adrenaline rush of impending combat, the thrill of the hunt. His hair stood on end. There was a crackling in the air as blue fingers of light danced up the beams of the shed from the water. They wriggled across the ceiling above him in a coruscating field of azure. The beam under him began to tingle with static energy that pricked at his skin through his clothing.
With the field of energy came a drop in temperature carried by a chill mist. Gang watched as frost formed on the beam beneath him. The rain droplets falling through the mist turned to ice.
Crawling backward, Gang moved to return to the cross catwalk behind him. The blue field turned white about him until it built to a harsh, blinding glare. His hand slipped on the slick surface under him. He was disoriented. A leg slid from the beam into the open air. The rifle fell from his hands to drop to the water six stories below. He lost his balance, his chin striking the beam surface with a crack. And then he was falling into the billowing clouds that rose about him.
Gang prepared himself for the plunge into the water.
Instead, sooner than he anticipated, he landed on a hard, ridged surface. He lost consciousness as his skull split in a topline fracture. The sudden impact snapped his spine. He was dead in seconds.
The crew of the Ocean Raj would not find his body for days. Not until they were drawn to investigate by the gaggle of gulls worrying at his corpse atop the stack of containers piled on the foredeck.
43
Gauntlet
The ocean quaked under peal after peal of cannon fire as the two armadas closed with one another and let loose cannonades across the narrow gullies of water that separated them. Round and canister shot tore sails to flying tatters as well as sweeping decks clean of life, leaving only a crimson wash behind. Hot loads blasted through firing decks, creating storms of flying wood shards that turned men to bloody rags. Somewhere in the melee, a ship was burning. It spilled a dense cloud of smoke atop the waves. Dwayne couldn’t see through the pall to know whether the vessel afire was Mughal or Norse.
Under orders shrieked by their acting captain Ivar, the dragon-helmed dreadnaught veered hard aport on its way toward the fight. Their new course sent them toward the rear of the Mughal armada. They slipped in through a miles-long gap where the vanguard had drawn ahead of slower moving transpo
rt following in a train of broad-beamed vessels stretched to the horizon.
The stern guns of the rearward ships of the main body clawed for them as Ivar ordered the tillermen to bring them about to cross the Mughals’ wake. The fat stern of an enormous gunship lay off their starboard less than a hundred yards distant. They moved well within the arc of fire; the Mughal stern gun unable to adjust their angle of fire to hit the dragon-prowed vessel now thwart their ass-end. Balls and shot sailed over the Norse tops to land harmlessly in the sea beyond, to the amusement of the crew.
Ivar bellowed, and his order was relayed down to the gundecks. Almost as one, the guns along the starboard side discharged with a fury that canted the deck to port causing unwary men to tumble against the thwarts. One poor bastard, who’d failed to get a firm grip above, fell screaming from an upper spar, shaken loose by the sudden and violent yaw of the keel. The world vanished in black fug that reeked of the rotten egg stink of burnt sulfur.
Their continued forward motion drew them clear of their own gun smoke cloud, and Dwayne could see the terrible damage the full broadside had created. The big Mughal ship was adrift now, the towering stern face unrecognizable now. The ports and windows were punched in as if by a gargantuan fist. The high command deck had collapsed, and somewhere amidships a mast had been struck, the bole of it swinging in a tangle of cording and lines and rent sails. The weight of it finally snapped it off above the deck, and it fell with a crash, the top striking the water, creating a sea anchor that caused the ship to veer farther port at an angle that was all wrong. In the crippled vessel’s wake floated a trail of broken timbers and broken men.
Dwayne could only imagine the damage he couldn’t see. The combined fusillade had torn through the rear end of the big boat and would have killed anyone in its path. All those men, fusiliers, and oarsmen, trapped together in the close quarters of the fighting decks. It was a damned ugly way to die, Dwayne thought.
Not done with his prey, Ivar ordered his crew to turn the ship about to bring his starboard guns to bear once again, this time along the side of the Mughal vessel. Guns were reloaded and run out once more for a rolling broadside that swept along the decks and hull in a merciless hail.
Through it all, to Dwayne’s amazement, the enemy ship kept up a fight with jezails and musketoons firing away from within the floating wreck. Arrows rained down from the sky, fired by archers perched high on the forward mast. One landed near the toe of his boot, the steel head burying itself in the decking, the shaft thrumming with the impact.
The men on the main deck called to Ivar, raising weapons in their fists and howling like wolves. Ivar leaned on the quarterdeck rail and shouted at them, face red with anger. One man started to climb the steps to the high deck. Ivar met him at the head of the steps and planted a boot in the man’s chest, sending him crashing to the boards.
“What’s that about?” Dwayne said.
“Some of the men want to board the ship and take it as a prize,” Samuel said. “He accused them of being low dogs when the day calls for wolves. They’re backing down for now.” It was true. Some of the men were even laughing at the guy who took a tumble down the steps. He was hobbling over the deck, favoring a leg that was clearly broken. Ivar wasn’t making any friends here, but he had the respect of the wild gang of blood-mad savages. They’d follow him to Hell.
A call from above was joined by other voices. All eyes followed their pointing fingers toward the van of the Mughal fleet. A vessel had pulled in front of the slower transport ships. It was low and squat and without sails. Oars worked in relentless time on either thwart. The bow raised a high cone of spray as it plowed the water on a course for the Norse ship. Ivar called an order. The guns that could be brought to bear, along the port side, fired at will, raising sprays of water before and aft of the mystery ship.
“It’s a bomb ketch,” Samuel said.
Dwayne gave him a squint.
“It’s packed with black powder and manned by either zealots or slaves out of their minds on bhat,” Samuel said.
“Suicide bombers.”
“Yes. Unless the guns can either cripple the boat or ignite the explosives before it comes in range.”
Dwayne leaned well out to study the ketch. He saw a round shot strike it squarely amidships. The ball caromed away to land with a splash in the boat’s wake. The rowing deck was covered over with rows of plate giving the boat the appearance of an iron turtle. More fire fell on and around it, but the oars continued turning, drawing the boat closer with every second.
Ivar had allowed his sails to luff when he made the turn to rake the Mughal dreadnaught a second time. He slid down the ladder to the main deck and called through the open hatch to the oarsmen to come about. Slowly, slowly, the big ship turned on its axis, propelled by some impressive teamwork from the rowers three decks below. The plan was clear, to present as small a target as possible to the bomb ketch and bring the sails back to an angle where the easterly wind could fill them once more.
Every man not engaged in the work of pulling an oar, loading or firing or clewing a line was at the port rails with eyes locked on the humpbacked little boat streaming toward them. The massive effort of the oarsmen under that iron shell was causing the boat to rock fore and aft. The motion raised the point of a ram above the bow wave. It was mounted at the prow just below the waterline; a barbed stinger meant to drive its way home into the timbers of its target and remain there until the powder in its belly was ignited.
The larger battle going on a few miles east of them was forgotten in their own private struggle to survive the next few moments.
The ship came about, the deck canted. With a boom, the sails began to fill; the strain of the fabric making lines crack like whips as all remaining slack came out of them. Men worked hard, sailors and warriors alike, to haul lines in place where they could be secured about cleats to consume every breath of force the wind could bring to bear.
It was all too late. From Dwayne’s vantage point along the port rail, he saw the little ketch vanish behind the swaying section of the quarterdeck on a direct bearing for the dreadnaught’s unprotected stern.
They’d torn the Mughal giant a new asshole, and now they’d share the same fate. The decking shuddered under their feet as the ram slammed home, driven through the planking with the force of a ten-ton hammer blow. The men at the tiller howled with fury or fear but kept their hands to the bar. One man moved to flee the quarterdeck. Ivar slammed him to the boards with a single blow.
“Figures that bitch Karma would be on their side,” Dwayne said.
The horizon tilted at a crazy angle. The deck came crashing upward, driven by a clap of thunder that tore the world to pieces.
44
The Devil His Due
Dwayne awoke to a world of silence. Hands had hold of him and lifted him bodily from the tilted deck.
He opened his eyes to find Samuel shouting at him without making a sound. There was nothing to hear but a warbling whine in both ears. The other man’s face was caked with dried blood from a gash along his hairline. Samuel shoved him against a thwart, and Dwayne found his legs again. He braced himself on a railing and shook his hearing clear. The whine faded, replaced by a muffled roar punctuated by the beating of his heart.
Samuel pulled him across the sloping main deck through a crowd of rushing men. Dead and wounded littered the deck. Men and pieces of men lay everywhere in a wash of crimson water sloshing back and forth as the deck lifted and yawed at the mercy of the sea. Dwayne turned his head to look sternward. The quarterdeck was simply gone. In its place, a scorched tangle of broken timbers. The tiller, rudder, captain’s cabin, and the captain himself had vanished in the blast from the bomb ketch. By some miracle, the ship was still afloat. But not for long.
The two men made their way through the chaos to the starboard deck. Dwayne leaned over to see the oars working in time to propel them into a coordinated turn to port. Without a rudder, the attitude of the ship was determined by the strong
backs, arms, and legs of the men pulling below.
The maneuver was happening at a crawl, the prow swinging by degrees and by inches. The four rows of sweeps toward the aft section lay idle in their locks, shattered to kindling by the explosion that tore the rear out of the vessel.
Dwayne felt Samuel’s fingers grip his arm. He turned to see the other man speaking sternly. Dwayne could only shake his head. Samuel pointed out over the water. Closing on them were a pair of the lumbering troop transports that had been following in the wake of the Mughal warships. The fat ships were coming bow down at speed. The sails were belled out and with sweeps rising and falling. The tops were crowded with figures. Men lined either side of the high prow watching eagerly as they neared their prey.
The Northmen's’ ship was foundering, its sails blown to strips, and the number of oars reduced. It was turning to flee the boats running down on it, but making little headway with the wind and current against it.
Men joined them at the rail, shouting and waving weapons aloft. Puffs of smoke appeared before the lead Mughal boat, bow chasers. A ball passed overhead, snapping dangling lines and tackle on its way to land in the water far off the port side. A second ball struck the timbers toward the bow, raising a geyser of splinters.
Dwayne felt a tremor through the deck boards as the guns below him were run out. Muted thunder and a curtain of white smoke rose up and was torn away on the breeze. Canister peppered the water either side of the lead Mughal vessel. A mainsail went limp as a ball sailed through the silk. But the boat came on, the blades all along the gunwales glittering in the glare of the sun off the wave tops turned copper in the late afternoon sun.
Cannonade followed cannonade as the two ships clawed at one another. The Viking ship, set as it was abaft of the approaching vessels, took most of the punishment. Broad abeam as it was, the Mughal ship was presenting itself by the bow, the more difficult target by far.