by Peter Nealen
All four were down on their knees on the deck, their eyes watering from the twin blasts and the stinging smoke, hands on their heads, fingers interlaced. An AEK-971 and a PL-14 pistol were lying on the deck, about six feet away from the man in green, looking like they’d been abruptly tossed there only a moment before.
As soon as I was certain that the bridge was otherwise clear, which took a split-second scan, I moved forward, my rifle trained on the man in green’s forehead, and barked, “Down on the deck! On your faces! Lozhites!”
The man in green complied, lowering himself to the deck and placing his hands on the back of his neck. The crew followed suit a moment later.
I slung my rifle to my back and hastily zip-tied the man in green’s hands behind his back. At the same time, my radio crackled in my ear. “Hillbilly, Albatross,” Bryan said. “Engine spaces are secured.”
“Roger,” I replied. I looked down at the man in green. “All right,” I said. “Where’s the rest of your team?”
“Unless they have surrendered, you have killed the rest of my team,” he said, in accented but clear English. “There were only six of us. We are VALOR PMC, hired to secure freighter. I set men to secure ladder and engine spaces.”
“Maritime security, huh?” I said sardonically. “Lots of pirates in the North Atlantic these days? Maybe Eskimo raiders, or French Canadians?” I let my voice turn hard. “If you wanted me to believe that bullshit, you probably shouldn’t have brought weapons only issued to Spetsnaz, fucknut.”
What I could see of his face remained stonily impassive.
The throb of the engines fell away to a dull background rumble. Bryan, or somebody, had backed the engines down so that we weren’t going to be making much headway anytime soon. We had time to clear the ship.
“Our boy seems awfully calm,” Alek said quietly.
“Yeah, he does,” I replied. “Means he thinks he’s got an ace up his sleeve.”
He nodded. “Which means they had a contingency plan for just this eventuality, and we can expect a counterattack pretty fucking soon.”
“Hey, guys,” Herman called from the forward windscreen, “none of you hit the hatch cover controls for the nearest cargo bay, did you?”
Alek and I traded a look. Here it comes.
“Everybody get down!” I yelled, just as a long, ravening burst of machinegun fire raked the front of the bridge.
Chapter 34
Herman fell back from the windows in a hail of shattered glass and a spray of blood, hitting the deck heavily in front of the ship’s wheel. The rest of us went flat as bullets chewed through the remains of the windows and smacked into the overhead, a few of them ricocheting off the steel to bang into consoles or the aft bulkhead.
The volume of fire was heavy enough that there had to be more than one gun. But I expected that machine gun fire from the hold was not the main effort. The PKPs or whatever was firing down there were shortly going to be the least of our worries.
“All Praetorians on first and second deck,” I yelled over the radio, “get below and strongpoint on the engine room. Third deck, get your asses up to the bridge! I expect we’re going to have company soon.”
“This is Frodo,” Shawn called over the radio. Shawn was one of the newer guys. He was solid, from what I’d seen. His five foot, four-inch stature had been what had earned him his callsign. “There are a lot of shooters coming out of the holds. We are not going to be able to hold them at the main hatch, not with only two of us!”
I couldn’t see if any of the 407s were still on station; if Sam had called me and said he had to head back, I hadn’t heard it, whether the radio had been blocked by the steel hull of the ship while we’d been below, or just drowned out by the noise and fury of the assault. But if the gunners in the hold weren’t being taken under fire from the air, that told me that we would be without air support for at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half.
That’s a long, long time in a CQB environment.
“Friendlies!” Ross bellowed from the other side of the still-open hatch. “Friendlies coming in!”
“Come ahead!” I yelled back. “And get low!”
Ross and Todd came through the hatch in a crouch, moving to get clear of the fatal funnel, and thus out from in front of the bristling hedge of rifle muzzles trained on the hatchway. Todd turned as soon as they were in and dogged the hatch behind him. The rest of us were already fanned out around the bridge, weapons trained on the hatch. There wasn’t a lot of cover; the control console was a single unit, with two seats facing it. The rest of the bridge deck was clear, except for our captives, the shattered glass of the windows, and Herman’s motionless body.
We still had a lot of firepower we could bring to bear on that hatchway, but the weight of numbers was on the enemy’s side. If they flooded the bridge with enough bodies fast enough, we were going to be in trouble. And probably very dead.
We didn’t have anything available to barricade the hatch, and I was starting to wish we’d brought some thermite grenades. Welding the hatch closed would have at least slowed them down, and bought us time while we waited for Sam to get back to provide some air support. Of course, that was presuming he could get back to us. The storm blowing in through the shattered windows seemed to be getting nastier.
Nick, Alek, Eric, and I were gathered near the starboard side, aimed in on the hatch. We would have the best angle on the opening when they tried to breach.
Between the howl of the wind and rain and the long bursts of machinegun fire that were still raking the front of the bridge, I couldn’t hear the enemy’s boots on the ladderwell or the deck outside. The first indicator that they were coming was when the dogging handle started to move.
I tucked the stock of my little Compressor into my shoulder and put the red dot right on the widening seam of the door. As soon as it had opened just about an inch, I started shooting.
I didn’t have a solid target. All I could see at that point really was the seam itself. But half a dozen .300 Blackout rounds zipping through the crack in the door, one hitting the coaming and ricocheting out through the hatch with a loud bang, certainly got the message across. There was a yell and the hatch was yanked shut.
Todd wasn’t having any of it. His own rifle slung, he took two steps from where he’d been crouched on the port side, grabbed the handle with one hand, a frag with the pin already pulled in the other, let the safety lever fly free, cooked it for a second, then yanked the hatch open about six inches, chucked the grenade through the opening, and slammed the hatch shut again.
The superstructure shook with the heavy thud of the explosion, and the hatch, incompletely latched, blew partway open under the pressure of the blast. We ate part of the shockwave, and got sandblasted with debris, mostly stripped flakes of paint. Fortunately, the frag was pretty much all contained in the passageway outside.
Without an update over the radio, there was no way to know how the guys down in the engine room were faring. The machinegunners out in the holds were still keeping our heads down and the storm was still howling through the windows. Gunfire wasn’t going to be audible through four decks, not with that cacophony deafening us.
The hatch hung open a hand’s breadth, but none of us wanted to move forward enough to close it. Besides, it gave us a clearer shot at anyone trying to come in through it.
For what felt like an eternity, we crouched behind our weapons, waiting and listening. What might have been faint screams and groans of pain came through the hatch, though, again, it was hard to tell over the rest of the noise. But the part of the hatchway we could see stayed empty.
I wasn’t fooled into thinking that they’d given up. Just like we had at Verdant Mount, they were trying to think of another avenue of attack.
The first real indicator that they’d come up with something came when the machine guns went silent.
I didn’t get it, not at first. It was Ross who yelled, “Watch the windows!”
At the same time he said
it, I heard boots rattling on the overhead. They’d climbed up on top of the superstructure, and were going to try to make entry through the windows. It was risky, but if we stayed focused on the hatch, they stood a chance of catching us looking the wrong way.
However, the storm, the wet, and the ship’s roll were more than some of them were quite ready for. There was a sudden muted thump, what might have been a shouted curse in Russian, and a body fell past the window, trailing a rope. Somebody had slipped.
I spared just enough of a glance back to assure myself that somebody, in this case Eric, was still covering the hatch, as the rest of us turned to address the new threat. Not a moment too soon, either, since the Russian team leader had correctly surmised that having one of his men fall off the superstructure had blown his approach, so he went live.
More ropes dropped down in front of the bridge, and at the same time, four softball-sized spheres were lobbed down through the windows. One bounced off the coaming and fell away, but the other three came in to bounce off the deck just inside the bridge.
I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing what was coming. I still saw the series of flashes through my closed eyelids, and while my Peltors mitigated the noise of the detonations, the concussions were still headache-inducing.
As soon as the last flash had flickered against my eyelids, I opened my eyes, my cheek already on my rifle’s buttstock and the red dot already trained on the nearest window.
They were good; the smoke from the stun grenades was still roiling toward the overhead as the first bodies came swinging through the windows. Unfortunately for the first wave, they were swinging right into line with our muzzles, and we’d all had the presence of mind to close our eyes and keep our earpro on, thus mitigating the shock effect of the stun grenades.
My finger was already tightening on the trigger as the figure in front of me swung in through the shattered glass. The trigger broke just as his upper chest passed the red dot, and I pumped five rounds into him as fast as the trigger would reset, walking them up from his front plate into his throat and face, before he’d even gotten his boots solidly on the deck. His feet flew out from under him, the back of his head hit the coaming, and he slid down the bulkhead, leaving a red smear behind him. The rain blowing in the open window immediately started to rinse the blood away.
Across the bridge, that first wave all suffered the same fate. They had to have been worried about killing the Russian we’d captured; I couldn’t imagine that they’d have held their fire coming through otherwise.
The second wave didn’t.
They must have figured out that something had gone wrong. Whatever led to the decision, after another ten seconds, the second wave came through the windows with their AEK-971s tucked under their elbows, spraying down their sectors as they came.
Fortunately, we were all crouched pretty low, and mostly shielded by the control console. Bullets smacked into the console and skipped off the top, hammering into the aft bulkhead with loud bangs. We all did our damnedest to get really, really small, and shot right back.
I had gotten down below the far starboard corner of the control console, crammed in there against Alek’s back, leaning down with my helmet damned near touching the floor as I stuck my rifle muzzle out to engage the nearest dark figure coming through the window behind the muzzle flash of his rifle. I felt a tug at my helmet, even as I shot him. He fell backward, though I couldn’t tell if it was because I’d hit him, or because he’d landed on top of his buddy’s corpse and lost his balance. He was still moving, so I put another round in his pelvis, which was the target that presented itself, before pivoting and shooting the next guy to my right, who had been a couple seconds behind him, in the head. I transitioned back to the first and gave him four more rounds, until he quit moving.
Everything went quiet after that. “ACE reports!” I croaked, even as I hastily reloaded. My heart was pounding and despite all the water in the air, my throat was dry as a bone. That had been about as close as I’d ever gotten to the proverbial “knife fight in a telephone booth,” and I’d been in a few CQB fights before.
One by one, the rest of the guys on the bridge sounded off. We’d shot a lot of rounds, and a few guys had gotten trimmed or grazed by the storm of gunfire that our adversaries had just thrown at us, but we’d been hardpointed well enough that nobody was dead or seriously wounded. Which I thought was a miracle.
Alek turned to look at me. His eyes widened a little, and he said, “Oh, fuck!” He let his rifle hang and reached for my helmet. “Don’t move!”
“What?” I didn’t feel anything but the wet, the growing headache from my helmet and the exertion and stress of everything piling up, and the aches and pains of my joints from contorting into a small enough space to try to stay in cover.
“You’ve got a bullet hole in your helmet, brother,” he said, as he ran his hands over the back of my head and neck, looking for blood. They came up clean.
Against his instructions, I reached up and tore my helmet off. Sure enough, there was a hole in it, high on the right side. I flipped it over, and found the ridge inside where the bullet had traveled through the Kevlar before stopping at the back, leaving a lump just behind my right ear. I reached up to my sopping wet hair, feeling for a wound, but my scalp was intact.
“Holy fuck, that was close,” I muttered.
“Hillbilly, Monster,” Larry called over the radio.
“Send it,” I replied, jamming my helmet back on my head and switching places with Alek, so that he could cover the front of the bridge around the side of the console. We still weren’t out of the woods yet.
“We’re all green,” he reported. “We’ve strongpointed the engine room. They’ve made a couple of attempts to force their way in, but haven’t been all that aggressive; I think they’re worried about damaging the machinery.”
“They’re less worried about damaging the controls,” I told him. “They’ve tried twice up here, but we’ve got a lull. I think they’re rethinking their strategy.”
“Agreed,” he said. “They’ve fallen back from the engine room hatches; we haven’t had anything to shoot at in a couple minutes. What’s the plan?”
“They’ve got the weight of numbers, from what we’ve seen,” I said, “but we just hurt them pretty badly.”
I was interrupted by the hatch getting blown in.
Whatever they used, it was low on frag, which saved our lives. I suspected it was a concussion charge, not unlike the makeshift ones we’d used on occasion; little more than a partial satchel of explosives wired to blow. I still felt the sting of bits of metal lashing into the backs of my legs and shoulders even as the concussion slammed me into the console.
I hadn’t buckled my chin strap back up, but my helmet was still on my head, and while the impact of my gourd on the metal still hurt like hell, at least it didn’t split my skull open. It had nearly knocked the helmet off my head, and I had to shove it back into position even as I pivoted to address the new threat coming from aft.
Eric was blocking my line of fire. It took a second to ID him; I’d gotten rocked. But he was facing away from me, blocking the hatch and firing through it. Brass spun rapidly away over his shoulder.
I could see him getting hit. One leg buckled underneath him, but he kept fighting, kept shooting. His rifle ran dry and he dropped it and transitioned to his pistol, emptying the SIG P220 down the passageway.
I got my feet under me and lunged toward him, my own rifle up in my shoulder. Even as I reached him and cranked a fast five shots down the corridor, his sidearm went dry and he fell.
He’d stacked half a dozen bodies in the passageway. There were two more rifle muzzles at the ladderwell, just barely sticking out far enough to shoot. They’d both flinched back from my fire just enough that they couldn’t hit me. I tapped a pair of shots at one, before I somewhat more carefully shot the second shooter in the eyeball. The first one ducked back and disappeared.
Nick was already dragging Eric back from the
hatchway, as Ross barricaded himself on the other side, pushing the now bent and mangled hatch itself as far against the bulkhead as he could. He almost slipped in Eric’s blood. There was a wide pool of it on the deck in front of the hatch. Too wide.
Todd tapped me and I backed out of the hatchway, letting him take it. I turned to Eric.
Nick had dragged him out of the fatal funnel and was trying to strip his gear off. He was fucked up. The front of his plate carrier was shredded, two of his mags shot through, and he was bleeding like a stuck pig. He looked like he’d caught a dozen rounds from knee to collarbone.
I grabbed my knife and slit his trouser leg, where there was the most blood. More of it pumped, hard and fast but weakening, from a ragged hole in his inner thigh.
“Motherfuck,” I snarled, as I yanked the tourniquet off his gear and started cranking it around his leg. It was wet and slick, and the hole was high enough up that getting the tourniquet above it without being actually on it wasn’t working very well.
“And here I was,” he said, “hoping that the last anyone would see of me was as I jumped into a Russian submarine with a hot bikini chick under each arm, a Desert Eagle in one hand, and a bottle of whiskey in the other.”
And just like that, the blood flow from his leg slowed, stopped, and he was gone.
Maybe I was just too rocked from the blast. Maybe I’d seen too many of my teammates die. Maybe I was in shock. Or maybe my nerves were just dead. I didn’t feel much of anything, just a tired, distant ache that I knew was going to get bad later. I reached down and closed his eyes. “Had to get that last one-liner out before you went, didn’t you, you son of a bitch?” I asked him, before getting to my feet. There was still a fight to be won, and we were still in a bad spot. That was probably why I was so fucking calm, really. Habits of thought and action were keeping me on an even enough keel to survive.
An unfamiliar voice suddenly crackled in my ear. “Hillbilly, Hillbilly, this is Chatterbox Five Four,” a woman’s voice said. “Please advise your status.”
