Battleship Boys

by Paul Lally

  Will any of the high-powered sniper rounds hit anybody? Hard to say. But for sure, they’ll have to take cover—which gives Muñoz the time he needs to get the hell out of here with the prize he came for in the first place.

  JJ’s furious voice is crystal-clear in Corporal Russell’s earpiece.

  “Fire at will!”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  If only her iPhone earbuds were as awesome as these military-grade ones, the sniper thinks as she chambers a belted, bottle-necked .300 Winchester Magnum round into the breech. If she had these kind of earbuds, her country-western music playlist would sound a zillion times better.

  Back to the business at hand: Corporal Russell estimates the target to be close to 1200 meters. A bit of a reach, but a battleship holding station in calm seas is a stable platform. Which helps, because the image of the bad guy firing the sniper rifle from the bow of the bright yellow cigarette boat moves up and down with slight wave action as he continues to land .50 calibers rounds into the ferry’s bridge with impunity. No time to wonder if he’s having any success. Only time enough to make sure she does.

  Russell licks her lips, savoring the trace of Dutch hot chocolate still on them. Good to be called to action like this. Otherwise, she would have polished off her entire stash and put on pounds that she doesn’t need.

  Captain Koga stands behind her, not wanting to interfere with her taking out the gunman. “Your weapon functions correctly the way I suggested?” he says softly.

  “Perfect fit, sir.”

  He nods, a complicit co-pilot.

  When the admiral first ordered her to provide counter-fire, Carla first took up a position on the passageway just outside the navigation bridge and braced her Barrett Mk 22 on a stanchion.

  But Captain Koga had a better idea and hustled her above one level to the “dashboard,” the open-air docking bridge, with a better view of the target plus the benefit of the pylon-mounted binoculars, onto which she nestled the Barrett’ sturdy bipod.

  “Compensates for the wave motion perfectly, sir,” she adds.

  From her end, that is.

  The sniper on the cigarette boat’s still a tricky deal. But she’s encountered more difficult targets in the past and succeeded in eliminating them.

  Carla begins by hearing “the song” in her head; a sign that the death-dealing process has begun and won’t end until she pulls the trigger.

  Same song.

  Every time.

  Started two years ago when she began training to become a Marine Corps Sniper Scout. Can’t get it out of her head. Gave up trying. Sometimes she hears Frank Sinatra singing it, sometimes Barbra Streisand, sometimes her own voice:

  Just in time, I found you just in time

  Before you came, my time was running low.

  I was lost, the losing dice were tossed,

  My bridges all were crossed, nowhere to go.

  She adds a single “click” to the sighting reticule to compensate for wind drift...

  Now you’re here,

  And I know just where I’m going

  No more doubt or fears,

  I’ve found my way.

  She shoves her cheek against the skeletal folding stock.

  Take care...the recoil always shocks...

  For love came just in time,

  You found me just in time,

  Breathe out...start to squeeze...

  And changed my lonely life that lucky day.

  A powerful CRACK. The stock SLAMS against her shoulder.

  She quickly reloads.

  Counter-fire on another sniper assumes he’ll target you if you miss. It’s happened twice before, and they say three’s the charm.

  But from the way the victim’s body jerks to the right and his arm flails upward, the .300 magnum round penetrated his upper thoracic region and mushroomed into a fist-sized chunk of jagged metal.

  Death is instantaneous.

  The song in her head ends.

  She licks her lips...and smiles.

  “Success?” Captain Koga says.

  Without taking her eye from the riflescope, she watches the cigarette boat accelerate the hell out of there.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Astonished, Muñoz watches helplessly as a hurricane of small-arms fire erupts from the Delta team, aimed at the disarmed sniper boat.

  Screw the gringos.

  He got what he came for, and he’ll meet them again one of these days, and when he does...

  He turns to shout at his helmsman to start engines, but the words stick in his mouth.

  Iván’s pointing a pistol straight at his chest.

  Not his pistol, though.

  Years of handling weapons tells Muñoz it’s a Glock 26; palm-sized, easy to conceal, as wide as the standard Glock to give you a solid “hold,” but half the size and loaded with enough nine-millimeter rounds to make your life miserable.

  In fact—

  Muñoz never finishes his thought because Iván pulls the trigger.

  The 9mm soft-nose bullet SLAMS the short, fat man backwards so violently that the backs of his knees strike the gunwale. His excess weight and sheer inertia do the rest. It’s a sizeable splash because Muñoz is—was—a sizeable man.

  Iván glances over the side. The late security chief has already vanished, swallowed up by the warm waters of the Gulf. The fish and sharks will soon be catching scent of the blood still pumping out of the fist-sized wound in Muñoz’s upper chest.

  Now, there’s a thought that makes Iván smile.

  “Dinner is served, amigos.”

  He points his pistol at Vargas. The man’s ashen face says it all.

  “Ready for dessert?” Iván says.

  “Clear it, CLEAR IT! Stanley shouts.

  Chef Curcio hunches over the Bofors’ feed chute and yanks on the four-round clip as hard as he can. Nothing doing. Seconds earlier, all was well. Stanley called for the new load so he could commence firing on Muñoz’s boat. Flushed with success at having clobbered the other one, Stanley’s war fever is raging.

  Curcio and McAfee each hefted their forty-pound clips to the feed chute; hers slid in with a satisfying CLUNK, but his hung up halfway.

  Teamwork is essential to most things in life. But when it comes to operating a complex weapon like a Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft gun, it’s life or death—in this case, continuing life to the cigarette boat with Iván and Vargas still alive and well, while—unknown to Stanley—Muñoz now “swims with the fishes.”

  Iván’s Glock held to the helmsman’s head makes him more than agreeable to follow his new leader’s orders, which are to get the hell out of harm’s way.

  But at this particular instant in time, the speedboat still bobs motionless in the calm waters; a sitting duck, dead center in Stanley’s “pancake” gunsight, while Curcio and McAfee struggle to unjam the clip.

  No luck.

  But what can you expect? These 40mm rounds have been sound asleep in a weapons arsenal for over 50 years. Something was bound to go wrong, and it’s a downright miracle it hasn’t—until now.

  But now is now, and as far as Admiral Lewis’s restored Bofors is concerned, it’s finito trying to take out that faraway speedboat floating like a sitting duck, waiting for someone, anyone to blast it to smithereens.

  For sure, Stanley’s an old guy and yes, his eyes are a bit rheumy, but damn it, he’s still got the eagle-like vision he had as a young gun captain on the Rock in the Big Two.

  Which is why nobody else in the cluster-fuck currently taking place in the gun tub notices what Stanley notices: a grey cloud of exhaust suddenly erupts as the cigarette boat’s six, 450hp Evinrude outboard motors clear their throats and come to life.

  “Son of a BITCH!”

  From Commander Goldstein’s mini-drone’s vantage point, orbiting three thousand feet above the action, the earlier, dramatic destruction of the machine gun-equipped cigarette boat was considerably different on the viewing screen.

  Boring, almost. />
  Momentary flickers of white as Stanley’s 40mm shells struck the water...then a fierce explosion when the rounds penetrated the boat’s hi-octane fuel tanks...and finally ending with a blast wave rippling through the water in concentric circles as if to say, “Here lies what’s left of the bad guys’ boat.”

  “Target destroyed,” the communication rating said at the time.

  “No kidding,” Commander Goldstein said without thinking.

  “Be nice if we could do more than just window shop, skipper.”

  “No kidding.”

  You can’t blame Goldstein for wanting to do more than be a helpless eyewitness. She signed up to defend the United States from all aggressors, not just point at them while clutching her pearls.

  But that’s all she and her reconnaissance team can do at the moment. Their mission was—still is—to provide real-time data to Major Williston’s Delta Force in such a way that they can do what SOCOM tasked them to do.

  But none of her high-tech bells and whistles can turn the tables on the Mexican standoff out here in the Gulf, with cigarette boats swarming the ferry like hungry sharks. Not a single one of them. Turns out, Stanley’s low-tech 40mm quad Bofors transformed that million-dollar speedboat into toothpicks.

  And just now, the sniper boat just turned tail and scooted away, wisely choosing life over certain death from the Delta Force team unloading with all the small arms fire they’ve got.

  Plus, the cigarette boat with Vargas is about to escape at top speed too, mission accomplished—for them, that is, not for CW and his guys—and her guys, too.

  Meanwhile, not a peep from the Rock’s 40mm Bofors. What the hell’s going on up there on deck?

  Plus, SOCOM’s dragging its feet to release the Reaper missiles for a weapons strike.

  Time for some “contingency action”

  Meet the Grumman MQ-5B Triton.

  An EHAD (extreme-high-altitude drone) that uses tongue-twisting “inverse synthetic aperture radar” to see and hear evil of all sorts. But it can do more than that. It can speak a boatload of evil, too with an onboard deadly combination of anti-ship and air-to-air missiles, plus JDAMs (Joint Direct Attack Munitions).

  Last known to be “parked” 40,000 feet above the east coast of Mexico, fifty miles north of Cancún, what exactly it’s doing up there is of no interest to Goldstein. The ways of the Navy’s maritime reconnaissance missions are beyond her pay grade. But, like Admiral Lewis, she knows somebody who knows somebody.

  Thirty seconds later, after speaking with him on an encrypted line , hope fills her heart like a blast of sunshine. That’s because her “somebody” has accepted her oh-so-casual-but-deadly-earnest offer to “paint” Muñoz’s cigarette boat with real-time target coordinates provided by her drones and uplink them to the Triton.

  That’s all.

  Nothing more.

  Just paint.

  He agrees to store real-time range and bearing information in the Triton’s “target queue.”

  Nothing more, mind you.

  Just another bit of data added to the dance card of this fancy-ass Navy drone that can do everything except whistle—but probably does that too, except nobody’s talking.

  “You never know when it might come in handy down the road,” Goldstein says to her “somebody.”

  “Painting away,” he says.

  JJ’s on the horn with both Major Williston and Commander Goldstein at the same time, thanks to the Falcon IV AN/PRC-155. The beauty of this high-tech radio is that it can handle multiband connections simultaneously. The “beast” of it is, everybody knows the bad news all at once.

  JJ and CW being judge and jury just hit a brick wall.

  The condemned criminal is now heading for the open sea—his jail door sprung by a malfunctioning 40mm shell created to destroy Kamikazes pilots hellbent on joining their Sun God during WW2, not modern-day cigarette boats, one of which is escaping to Mexican shores with Vargas on board.

  “Can any of your drones assist, commander?” JJ says to Goldstein.

  “Negative, sir, but I managed to get a Triton painting the target.”

  The admiral grouses, “It’d be nice to do something more than just point a laser dot.”

  “Sorry, sir, it’s the best I could do.”

  Silence—or what passes for it—a sibilant “hissssssss” on the multichannel connection the three of them ponder the truth of the botched mission.

  Mixed emotions for sure.

  Good points, yes; they did manage to rescue the hostages, including the VP’s kid. But as for the bastard that did the killing.... watching him fade into the sunset while throwing the finger—metaphorically speaking...

  That’s a hard pill to swallow.

  While the three of them brood over a less-than-successful mission, neither Iván nor Miguel are exactly flipping their middle fingers at them as their cigarette boat accelerates away from the ferry and heads back to Puerta Vallarta.

  That’s because Iván’s pressing his Glock against Miguel’s chest.

  “What the hell are you doing, man?” Vargas tries to shove the barrel away. “Put that down.”

  Instead, Iván shoves him backwards so hard that he sprawls on the deck. At the sound of the THUMP the helmsman nervously glances over his shoulder.

  One swift, merciless look from Iván carries the unspoken message. “Keep driving or you’re next.”

  And so he does, ever accelerating the high-speed boat. Its long hull seems impervious to the vagaries of the waves as it spans their intervals like a pole vaulter. The vessel’s extremely high length-to-width ratio serves its purpose well as the best “getaway” boat in the world.

  Bootleggers and rumrunners perfected a design back in the 1920s whose marine engineering logic still holds true today, albeit in most cases, nothing more sinister than high-speed races during summer festivals with elegant, barracuda-slender, over-powered boats skittering and roaring up and down rivers in search of the checkered flag while onlookers cheer from shore.

  Today, Iván’s in search of the distant shore of Puerta Vallarta, with every intention of arriving as the sole survivor of a failed rescue mission. But to do so requires finishing up unfinished business.

  He raises his voice for Miguel to hear him over the muted roar of the outboard motors. “Want to know why you’re going to die, or just die?”

  Vargas wisely remains sprawled on the deck. Staring at the business end of a Glock has the power of generating immobility. He raises up on his elbow. “You’re out of your fucking mind, amigo.”

  “Goes without saying. But better crazy than dead—answer my question.”

  “The boss will find out.”

  “How? Mental telepathy?”

  “He has his ways.”

  “You’ve run out of yours.”

  Vargas sits up, grabs his knees, but doesn’t stand. “Do me a favor, will you?”

  “A favor?” This gets a laugh. “Name it.”

  “Do what you need to do but promise to bring my brother home. And tell him I’m sorry I failed.”

  “Done.” Iván raises the pistol. “Last chance....”

  Miguel shrugs, looks over his shoulder. “The driver is next, I suppose?”

  Iván glances forward for an instant, then back again. And nods.

  “Good. That’s what I would do if roles were reversed.”

  “They’re not, but thanks for the compliment.”

  “One more favor.”

  “Last one.”

  “Adrianna... tell her that...” His voice chokes with emotion. Then he mumbles something, but so softly that Iván stoops slightly to hear better.

  Miguel’s right leg sweeps out like a scimitar while he simultaneously rolls to his left, knocking Iván off balance and tumbles him to the deck.

  Being the shorter of the two, he POUNCES on top, using both arms to pinion Iván’s gun hand against the deck. Two hard SLAMS and the Glock skitters across the deck.

  The fight is on.

/>   From 50,000 feet, two assailants locked in a life-or-death struggle on a speeding cigarette boat across the Gulf of Mexico are nothing more than microscopic pixels on the Triton UAV’s synthetic aperture radar.

  Its laser-designator beam’s been relentlessly targeting the speedboat’s ever-changing position and continuously updating the range, speed, bearing, and relaying them to whomever—or whatever—is interested in knowing this sort of thing.

  It’s one of many hoops this highly sophisticated, high-altitude long-endurance UAV can easily jump through. A multi-tasking fiend, it instantaneously transmits each and every one of its assigned reconnaissance tasks to a specific ground control station—this particular one situated in an “undisclosed location” in Waco, Texas.

  It’s here, in the bowels of what looks to passing motorists like an abandoned strip mall—but is just the opposite—that, with the merest touch of a single backlit key on his keyboard, the Navy Communications Specialist on duty responds to Commander Goldstein’s mysterious “somebody’s” order to relay the Triton’s “paint job” to SOCOM, who’s “informed” that the Navy has stuck its toe in the muddy waters and is providing additional “targeting data” on the aforementioned human pixels fighting to the death on the cigarette boat, should SOCOM be so interested.

  They are.

  Very much so.

  General “Clark Bar” Richardson in particular

  The following takes approximately twenty seconds:

  At his headquarters at MacDill AFB, Florida, General Richardson frowns at this unexpected information. But only mildly. This four-star’s “Regular Army” all the way, fiercely devoted to all things military. But when it comes to overseeing the combined efforts of all the United States’ armed forces, he can’t play favorites.

  Not ever.

  Especially, when Navy Commander Hanna Goldstein went out on a limb without prior approval to get a Triton to use its laser target designator to set up the dinner table for anybody hungry enough to show up.

  How wrong of him as watch commander to overlook a golden opportunity to tell the CIA to go fuck itself.