or I stand you up. Then I bum-rush you right over the rail. It’s your choice. I don’t give a shit. We’re out of time.”
Mendez got a foot underneath himself and stood. “Screw you.”
“Good.” Bolan nodded in approval. “Anyone else?” He suddenly held up his hands. “Except you, Abe. Not sure I can bum-rush you anywhere, big man.” Big Abe snorted. “No worries, brah. Anyone turns chicken shit on this action, I’ll hold ’em, you hit ’em.” The Samoan lifted his chin toward the blue waters over the bow. “Then I’ll be happy to take out the garbage.”
Despite his extreme physical discomfort, Mendez bravely raised his hand. “Can I ask a question?”
“I welcome questions, Laz.” Bolan nodded. “What’s on your mind?”
“Do you have a plan?”
“We have a strategy.” Bolan turned to Crane Specialist Houston, who set a brandy carton full of bottles on the table. Every soldier who had seen combat kept a spare pair of boots close. Bolan had requisitioned all of them and spent the last hour cutting out the boots’ tongues and weaving the laces. The Executioner took up his backpack and dumped out his handiwork on the table. “Houston.”
Crane Specialist Houston took up an Amrut bottle loaded with kerosene and liquid soap with a bandanna stuffed down the neck.
Big Abe sighed happily. “Molotov cocktail!”
Bolan nodded at Houston. “Light me.”
He put the bottle in the sling and Houston’s Zippo lighter chinked. Bolan pulled the sling taut and gave the burning bottle three good revolutions to give the fire oxygen, then slung it. The flaming bottle pulled a beautiful spiral and slammed into the bow crane ten meters away. Bolan was pretty sure Captain Cleverly was having a fit up in the bridge as the fire clung viscously and crawled up the crane. Team Viking stared in fascination.
Bolan reached into a plastic bucket and took up a one-inch ball bearing he had requisitioned from the ship’s engineer and seated the sphere of high-carbon stainless steel in the sling’s pocket. It had been a while since Bolan had used the maneuver, but he gave it the forward, back and forward Z-shaped windup for dramatic effect and let loose.
The flaming crane boom rang like a bell.
“And that’s how David slew Goliath.”
Big Abe clapped his hands. “Biblical, brah.”
The rest of the team started applauding. The crewmen standing under the bridge started applauding. Bolan nodded at Houston, and the crane specialist ran to the boom with a fire extinguisher. Bolan held up the sling to his team.
“They have to sail right up to us. They have to try to attach a ladder, then they have to climb up it. This is how we defeat them. They aren’t ready.” Bolan turned and held out the sling. “Abe, you’re up.”
Bolan stood on the bridge wing and took in the Arabian Sea breeze. The stars were just fading. Every member of his team could reliably hit a crane at twenty meters, and he figured that meant they could hit a human at five. Everyone had ten ball bearings half the size of a golf ball in their cargo pockets, and boxes of Molotov cocktails were spaced strategically around the deck with a lighter or matches handy. So were buckets of cooking and machine oil. Houston and three other sailors had volunteered to man the water cannons watch on watch, and the captain was issuing a tot of the opened brandy after each watch to improve morale.
Bolan nodded to himself and drank coffee. The cook on the Caprice was no Namzi, but he’d do. Coffee and hot food were available 24/7. Bolan’s team was spoiling for a fight, the crew was salty and the Caprice was as ready for battle as it was ever going to be.
Bolan just hoped the enemy didn’t have RPGs.
He smelled Ibarra’s perfume just before he heard the click of the ball bearings in her pocket. “Hey, Blue.”
“Hey yourself.” Bolan held out his coffee. Ibarra accepted the mug. She was wearing her sling around her brow like a headband. “No brandy in yours?”
“Nope.”
Ibarra lifted her chin into the breeze and breathed deep with pleasure. “About an hour till sunrise.”
Bolan’s internal clock agreed as he watched the horizon. “Yeah.”
“Wanna go for a quickie in the crane operator’s booth?”
“Yeah.” Bolan shook his head. “But nope.”
“What, we’re still on duty?”
“I’m pretty much on duty 24/7 until we’re in international waters and have guns.”
“What about when we are victorious?”
“Then we’ll celebrate like our pagan ancestors.”
“Which means you’ll be on me like a conquistador on an Aztec princess?”
“Something like that,” Bolan admitted.
“Can’t wait.” Ibarra held out the mug. “Until then I could use more coffee.”
He pushed off the rail. “Yes, ma’am.”
Ibarra seized his hand. “Blue!”
Bolan looked where Ibarra was looking.
“I swear I saw something!”
Yard hadn’t even issued them night-vision equipment. Bolan gazed into the gloom. In the purple light of the predawn he caught whitecaps moving across whitecaps. “Good eye, B.B. Sound the alarm. We’ve got fast boats coming in.”
Ibarra ran into the bridge. Bolan took the gangway down to the main deck a landing at a time. His boots rang on main deck as the captain spoke across the intercom. “All hands! This is not a drill! Action stations!”
Big Abe charged up. “Is this it?”
“This is it.” Bolan put his phone on speaker and slapped its Velcroed back onto his tactical vest. “Captain?”
“Yes, Mr. Blue?”
“Sound and lights.”
Every light on the Caprice clicked on like Christmas. Her harbor searchlights stabbed out into the gloom as the ship’s collision alarm began its whoop, whoop, whoop! The deck hummed beneath Bolan’s boots as the freighter’s two four-stroke diesels went to full power. Twenty-five knots was just barely under thirty miles per hour, but it would make hooking onto the Caprice much harder.
Mendez shouted as speedboats pierced the halo of lights surrounding the Caprice. “Here they come!”
AK-47s stuttered into life from the approaching boats almost as if they had heard him. Captain Cleverly shouted across the open phone line they were using as a com-link. “It’s the bloody Spanish armada...”
Bolan watched the pirates come in. Cleverly was right. There were too many of them. Even if they had a mother ship, three or four skiffs were the most that were carried, and they usually fanned out to form a wide net across a shipping lane. This group had launched from a land base, and someone had told them when and where to intercept the Caprice. Bolan counted half a dozen. Orange fire strobed from the prows of the pirate skiffs, and bullets rattled like hail off the hull and sparked and whined off the superstructure. Bolan and his team dropped low. Bullets hit the bridge and shattered windows.
Captain Cleverly swore a blue streak. “Fast boats coming alongside to starboard! Right in front of you, Blue!”
The ladder hooks clanked onto the rail and bullets streaked over it. Someone was providing effective covering fire. The hooks rattled and shifted as the ladder took the weight of boarders. “Abe!” Bolan loaded his sling with a Molotov. “You’re up!”