Battleship Boys

by Paul Lally

The twin hulls of the 135-foot, high-speed catamaran Pez Vela split the Gulf of Mexico waters like a hot knife through soft ice cream, thanks to the ferry’s twin Yanmar marine engines.

  They’re engineering things of beauty, with long piston-strokes for maximum torque-to-kilowatt ratio, plus silicard-coated cylinders to combat wear and tear. The monster 8x6x6-foot-high diesel engines power two beefy Cummins 6C-CR generators, that are more than happy, in turn, to pump DC current into thrust-vector pumps that churn the Gulf waters into creamy foam, currently disappearing astern at well over forty-five miles per hour.

  This is One. Fast. Ferry.

  But considering Admiral Lewis and Major Williston’s presence on the bridge, urging the captain to make even more “all possible speed” back to Cozumel, the Pez Vela’s soon flirting with fifty-one miles per hour.

  “I appreciate your making an exception, captain,” Admiral Lewis says. “I know how important schedules are to your company.”

  Captain Dominguez, a tall, studious-looking four-striper, nods his acceptance. “Considering your situation, I’m honored to oblige. We will soon have you and your men safely back in Cozumel.”

  CW admires the spacious bridge and sniffs. “Brand new boat?”

  A youthful grin transforms Dominguez’s weathered face. He pats the throttle console. “Two weeks tomorrow.”

  “We’re practically flying in this thing.”

  The captain fingers the polished chrome, twin throttles sparkling in the sunlight. “Four thousand horsepower—more if we need it.”

  “That’s a lot of grunt,” Willie says.

  Dominguez laughs. “I like that expression.”

  “It’s all yours, captain.”

  The door BANGS opens. Gunnery Sergeant Nuell bursts in. “Jesus H. Christ, here you are, sir. I’ve been calling you!”

  CW fingers his headset. “What the hell? It’s dead.”

  “We’re gonna’ be, too, if we don’t do something about the bad guys.” He points aft. “They’re off our stern and closing fast. C’mon.”

  JJ, CW, and Gunny hustle out to the docking bridge to view aft. The ferry’s broad, foamy, thruster wake flattens the calm waters even more. Then bursting through that wake come four slender vessels making all possible speed.

  By JJ’s best guess, they’re easily gaining on the ferry with every second. So ingrained is his habit after from a lifetime of sailing in harm’s way, that after a momentary glance through borrowed binoculars, he speaks without thinking.

  “Sound battle stations, surface action.”

  Muñoz and Iván are in the lead cigarette boat, a pencil-thin, ocean-going dart, powered by six Mercury 450R V-8 outboard engines. Thanks to an incredibly long hull designed to bridge waves’ interval period, it leads three similar “fast boats” that skim over the water like it’s not even there.

  These are not quiet vessels. That much “grunt”—450 horsepower per engine, times six engines per boat—raises hell with the eardrums and they can be heard coming from far away.

  But catching them is another story.

  Capable of speeds in excess of 80 mph—some even claim reaching 100 mph—their “legal” use is in racing events around the world. Everybody likes things that go fast: cars, planes, trucks, and boats, and these particular musclebound works of marine art go really FAST.

  Which is exactly what Muñoz needs, if he’s going to pluck this burning chestnut out of the fire of a security failure that happened on his watch.

  Yes, Iván blindsided him.

  Yes, he had no way of knowing.

  That son-of-a-bitch was so damn clever covering his tracks that only a string of bad luck on his part gave Muñoz the chance to dig deep enough to find the rat in the woodpile and drag him out by the tail, kicking and screaming.

  He was lucky to catch Iván in time and he knows it—a strong reminder that luck is not always on the good guys’ side.

  Muñoz had tons of it when he nailed Iván. Even more when he first thought to use high-speed cigarette boats to intercept the ferry. Then the real luck started raining down. Normally used by Garcia’s men to make on-the-spot “special deliveries” of drugs to various dealers across the Gulf and down to Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, four of the nine fast boats they normally use were in for annual maintenance and had just received a fresh bill of health.

  One of the boats packs a McMillan TAC 50 long-range anti-materiel precision rifle with telescopic sight. Manned by one of the cartel’s expert snipers, he and his weapon lie prone on the foredeck, the bipod-mounted rifle snugged tight to his shoulder to absorb its enormous recoil, awaiting Muñoz’s targeting orders. The rifle’s match-grade ammunition can almost guarantee that whatever it hits will be destroyed.

  Cigarette Boat #2 sports a more traditional M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun, post-mounted in the stern cockpit. Able to punch holes through ¼ inch steel plate, the Pez Vela’s much-touted, lightweight, all-aluminum construction will be no match for raking fire along her waterline, letting in water and taking out innocent lives. Like the sniper’s rifle, the Browning also uses match grade ammo packed with extremely stable propellants to guarantee “consistent performance velocity.”

  The cost of the high-priced, highly lethal rounds is not shown in any of the cartel’s accounting spreadsheets. But let the record show that these particular .50 caliber rounds cost ten times more than standard ones. That said, when it comes to security, Muñoz spends money the way he washes his hands (both with great OCD regularity). To the cartel security chief’s way of thinking and acting, price is no object.

  Just the object itself.

  In this case, stopping this high-speed ferry dead in its tracks so that he can rescue Miguel Lopez-Vargas.

  He and Iván sit in the aft cockpit of Boat #3, wearing seatbelts—just in case. It’s a balancing act as the security chief jams binoculars to his eyes. The distant silhouette of the battleship snaps into sharp focus. By his estimate, it’s about two miles offshore Cozumel, making about fifteen knots—and accelerating with every minute.

  “Madre di Dios, we must hurry! Once they’re onboard that monster, we’ll never get him back.”

  “Not to worry.” Iván says. “It’s a toothless museum ship, not a warship. ”

  “A museum the size of Cancún!”

  Iván shrugs off his concern. At this point, he makes no pretense of giving a damn about Muñoz’s desperate efforts to save Vargas. While it’s true the security chief has blown his cover, it’s only a temporary advantage.

  When this harebrained rescue mission of his fails—and it will—and Vargas continues his way north to gringo justice, it’s going to be Iván’s word against Muñoz’s with Garcia—that is, providing the fat Maya security fuck’s still alive.

  Hmmm....now there’s a thought.

  Not for nothing has Iván amassed private “connections” with Mérida and Cancún assassins over the years, while clawing his way up the cartel power ladder. These men—and a few select women—not only know how to do the job right, but they never ever leave a trace. Something to think about, while this bastard security chief acts like a tinpot admiral commanding a fleet of high-speed bathtub toys—albeit with some damned sharp, match-grade “teeth.”

  The Pez Vela trembles bow to stern as her twin diesels hammer full power to the generators. The Rock’s less than a mile away, now. But considering a flotilla of high-speed, heavily armed boats is in hot pursuit, it’s an eternity.

  Admiral Lewis’s order: “Battle stations, surface” took instantaneous root. Major Williston dispersed his team in a perimeter defense against the impending threat. In the meantime, Jack and Tommy ordered the ship’s complement of “active-duty-until-further-notice” Battleship Boys to lay below to the central passenger area below decks, as far away from the vulnerable sides of the ferry as possible.

  A fruitless gesture, of course. Stressed aluminum sheets are a poor substitute for armor plate.

  It’s an unspoken understanding between fath
er and son that if heavy weapons gunfire erupts, the bad guys’ bullets will take their toll. But the last thing they’re going to do is spread that alarm among the men.

  Instead, they calmly direct the guys to put on lifejackets, allowing the deadly serious look on their faces to transmit the gravity of the situation without going into specifics. Those details will come soon enough. Not wise to speculate at this point.

  Instead, Tommy says in his best courtroom voice that can carry across a football field, let alone the narrow confines of the interior passenger deck, “As you know, gentlemen, this is no drill. We’ve got bad guys coming at us from all sides. They want what we’ve got. This joker right here.”

  He points to a calm and collected, zip-cuff-tied Vargas, seated with his legs crossed on one of the ferry’s hard-on-your-ass passenger seats. Watched over by Sergeant Nuell, he stares fixedly at the overhead, as if on another planet, inhabited by alien beings.

  “Well, I’ve got news for our little cartel mass-murderer, here. And if he’ll give me his undivided attention, I’ll share it with him. Sergeant, would you do the honors?”

  “The man’s talking to you, asshole,” Nuell says.

  Vargas continues pondering the imponderable.

  “Your ears fall off, pal?” Nuell lifts his SCAR rifle butt first and CRACKS him across his back. “Look alive, Señor Shithead.”

  A flash of rage in Vargas’s eyes—quickly quelled—lest the gringos get the better of him. He’s full-blooded Maya. He not only understands suffering, but he can also withstand it without breaking. It’s in his DNA to endure the unendurable, like his 16th century ancestors did before him when Pedro de Alverado decimated his people. What’s true for them is true for Vargas and for future Maya generations who will continue to endure a balance of power that’s perpetually on the side of the occupier, not the native.

  But as surely as the Maya dug tunnels beneath Cancún to escape persecution hundreds of years ago, so too does Vargas dig his own mental “tunnel” to escape the palpable danger now filling the passenger space of a modern-day ferry in the form of a red-faced, angry-looking gringo lawyer.

  Tommy stands before him. “Got a quote for you, mister. ‘The mills of the gods grind slow but exceeding fine.’ Ever heard of that?”

  A microscopic shake of his head, but Tommy sees he’s got the man’s attention. “Look outside that window. Tell me what you see—that window right over there.”

  Vargas doesn’t budge. So Gunny “helps” him by wrenching the man’s head around to gaze out the ferry window at the long, lean silhouette of the USS New Hampshire in the distance.

  The battleship is now about a half-mile to port. Tommy figures Captain Koga’s already given orders to heave-to and eventually stop for boarding. So close and yet so far! Once on board—correction—if they get on board, it’s a done deal. No piddly-ass fast boat has a chance to stop a Montana-class battleship.

  “Isn’t she a beauty?” he says. “She’s your next stop on a long trip to spending the rest of your sorry life locked up inside a four-by-six-foot reinforced concrete prison cell, with a stainless-steel toilet missing its seat and guaranteed to freeze your ass on a cold morning as you stare at the walls and get ready to gag down a cold breakfast with a plastic spoon—that you hand back when you’re done.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll have fifteen minutes a day to stretch your legs in a walled in-courtyard—but the guards will shackle you like a dog so you can stumble around in a place where the only light you’ll ever see comes from a sun that will never shine on you again.” He pauses. “Want to know what happens next?”

  Vargas stares at him but says nothing.

  “I’ll tell you what. You shuffle back to your solitary confinement hole. The guards take off your shackles. Then they CLANG the door shut and you stare at the walls again—oh, I almost forgot—promise me one thing, okay?”

  A long pause.

  Vargas lifts his chin slightly, as if to say ‘what?’

  “While you’re there, remember my face, and all the faces you see here today, and the faces of the men you killed and had killed. Men who had mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, children—men who had lives that you took instead of God—want to know something else?”

  Vargas looks away. He’s finished listening to this white-haired, florid-faced, Irish son-of-a-bitch gringo who won’t turn him loose the way a dog won’t his favorite bone.

  Tommy takes two steps closer. Nuell slides his trigger finger into the guard as the old man points at Vargas and raise his voice to be heard across two football fields.

  “You’re not God, Señor Miguel Lopez-Vargas. You are the devil incarnate, and we—we band of brothers, we Battleship Boys, we are God’s archangels. And we are sending your sorry, contemptible, ruthless, washed-up body and soul straight back to hell!”

  Two years later, when Hollywood got around to making “Battleship Boys” into a movie, the screenwriters ended the scene with Tommy and Miguel at this point cut to a scene with the fleet of Muñoz’s cigarette boats swerving around in the water to get into position. Which most likely was happening at this moment in time considering what happened next, but that was the movie.

  This is what really happens:

  The deck plates begin vibrating like a tuning fork. Up on the bridge, Admiral Lewis and Major Williston grab on to something to keep from falling as Captain Dominguez SLAMS the ship’s thrust-vector pumps into full reverse to stop the high-speed ferry from being a high-speed, ocean-going vessel.

  As a result, the turbine powered thrust transforms what was once a flattened, foamy wake trailing behind them for a half-mile into a boiling maelstrom as the ferry swiftly loses headway.

  What Tommy and Jack and the guys don’t hear because of the thundering THRUMMMMM of the diesel engines, is the .50 caliber enemy machine gun fire that triggers Captain Dominguez’s decision to apply full left rudder and bow thrusters to slew the ferry to a stop even quicker.

  Topside, Admiral Lewis doesn’t need binoculars to see what’s going on. The person firing the machine gun mounted on the stern of the lead cigarette boat stitches a straight line of vertical splashes well ahead of the ferry’s bow: warning shot to be sure.

  “Check fire, check fire!” Williston barks into his mouthpiece.

  But quickly remembering his intercom’s malfunctioning, he tears out of the bridge to make sure his team doesn’t engage until they can figure out what the hell’s going on.

  He knows he shouldn’t worry. Delta Force team members are renowned for their group-discipline. They’d no more act independently than fly to the moon.

  But...

  Fifty-caliber bullets have a way of tempting a person to react in self-defense, so he’s making sure, while JJ does the same.

  Inside the bridge, Muñoz’s heavily accented voice blaring over the loudspeaker is crisp and efficient. “You have exactly ten minutes to surrender your prisoner Miguel Lopez-Vargas. Any attempt to interfere with our demand will result in the destruction of your vessel and the deaths of all the passengers and crew on board. Do you understand?”

  Captain Dominguez keys his microphone and instinctively opens his mouth to speak. But Admiral Lewis’s upraised hand stops him.

  As he does so, Jack bursts inside the bridge. “What the hell—”

  Another wave to silence and “Shhhhh’s!” all around.

  JJ turns to Captain Dominguez, “Tell him you’ll comply.”

  Jack says, “But you can’t—”

  “We won’t, but they don’t know that yet—do it, captain.”

  Dominguez nods and proceeds in a rapid blur of Spanish.

  As he does so, Lewis raises his binoculars to focus on The Rock, about a quarter mile away, barely making headway as Koga resolutely brings her to a halt to match the ferry’s position.

  CW returns to the bridge as fast as he departed, a replacement headset clamped over his baseball cap, talking blue streak. “I don’t want to hear you can’t reach them; I want you
to goddamn REACH them.”

  His face shifts from angry rage to innocent amusement. “All due respect, Admiral, but you navy guys... I mean, give me a break.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Commander Goldstein’s trying to raise DeltaCon but can’t get through.”

  “Which is...?’”

  “Satellite the CIA timeshares with the Air Force. If they can get it looking down on us, Goldstein can redirect assets to blow those assholes in the boats to kingdom come.”

  “Your men can’t?”

  “C’mon, sir, my guys are wearing Hawaiian shirts, for God’s sake. We went into this mission with retaliatory assets. Our big stuff’s still on the ship, safe and sound. We’re left with popguns versus fifty caliber, and worse, one of the boat’s got a guy aiming what’s got to be a TAC-50 at us.”

  “Which boat?”

  “Over there, ten degrees off the starboard bow.” Williston points to a cigarette boat hove-to in the distance. “Sniper stuff. Precision ammo for sure. Out of range of our guys, but he can start punching rounds through this tub like ducks in a shooting gallery—listen, you aren’t really going to give up Vargas are you?”

  “Not unless I have to.”

  “Are you kidding me? To come all this way and...” CW lets the thought hang.

  “And?”

  “That shithead’s killed those guys in cold blood. Cut their goddamn heads off for Christ’s sake.”

  “Bad things happen to good people.”

  Shocked at the meaningless platitude, CW gives his commanding officer a grim once-over from bow to stern, assessing this grey-haired, buzz-cut, warhorse pulled out of retirement to keep things legal. Is he folding his cards without thinking about drawing from the deck?

  “Then with all due respect, sir, I suggest it’s goddamn time that good people like us keep that son-of-a-bitch on this boat and send those bad people out there straight to hell.”

  Admiral Lewis absorbs Willie’s outburst, his facial expression utterly neutral. A good commander leads from within, not without, including keeping his feelings out of the decision equation until he arrives at one.