Unfathomed (The Locus Series Book 1)

by Ralph Kern

  Kendricks leaned around the cargo pallet and fired two shots toward a terrorist who had stood and began running toward a yellow forklift truck that would have given him a better angle to attack the beleaguered security team.

  The man skidded to a halt and ran back, spraying his AK-47 wildly toward Kendricks. Rounds pinged into the bulkhead behind him, one bouncing back into the pallet that he was crouched behind, narrowly missing Kendricks’s head.

  “Are all the medics and crew out?” Kendricks shouted, his voice twisted with the pain of his injured shoulder.

  “From what I can see,” Singh called back.

  “Good. Let’s withdraw, we can try and bottle them up in the corridor.”

  ***

  Panting from the exertion, Jack had managed to descend fourteen decks. He had had to weave his limping way past dozens of screaming, panicking people, but now he was in the crew sections where the sound of the gunfire was audible as a metallic, echoing roar.

  “The security room?” he said breathlessly as he grabbed a waiter who was running down the corridor.

  “Down there, it’s signed.” The man didn’t even question who he was, merely pointing down Route 66 before continuing his blind escape from danger.

  Jack set off at a run, glancing left and right at the bulkhead doors as he passed them, looking for the right room.

  Finally, he reached it, the hatch door already half open. Inside were five scared looking men and women.

  “I’m here to help,” he panted, trying to catch his breath.

  “Please, sir, go back to your rooms,” a young terrified-looking Sri Lankan man said.

  “Listen, you’re being boarded. I’m military. Give me a gun and let me help,” Jack said.

  “Me too,” A panting voice said from behind Jack. Turning, he saw a man in his late thirties wheezing, his hands on his thighs. Taking a deep breath, he stood up. “I’m Major Leonard. U.S. Army.”

  “Major, I’m Sergeant Cohen. Marines.”

  “Are you infantry?” Leonard asked, his eyes were wide with fear.

  “Yeah, Force Recon. And you, Major?”

  “Logistics Branch.”

  Shit, Jack thought. “Okay, sir. You mind if I take operational command in that case?”

  “With fucking pleasure,” Leonard snorted.

  “Guys, we can either mess around,” Jack said, addressing the security officers, “or you can accept the help of two trained soldiers.” Well, one trained soldier and one guy who has probably shot a gun less than your average Texan housewife.

  “Okay, okay,” said the man who had first responded to Jack, who seemed to be the closest thing to a leader of the remnants of the security team. He pointed at the open armory door. “Take what you need.”

  Jack stepped in and pulled a handgun off the rack.

  ***

  “Go, go, go!” Kendricks shouted. The three surviving security and the staff captain broke cover and ran at the open door.

  A deluge of fire followed them, striking one of the security in the back, knocking her onto her front. She lay silent, a puddle of red expanding around her.

  Ducking into the corridor, Kendricks slammed the hatch shut. There was no way to secure it, but it at least stopped the terrorists firing after them.

  “Okay, back to Route 66-C,” Kendricks said. He flicked his phone out and wiped the blood-covered touchscreen on his trousers. “Captain, have we got any reinforcements coming?”

  “Yes. We’re mustering them up. You have a few more on the way.”

  “We’ve withdrawn to lateral twenty-seven. We’ll draw them back.”

  ***

  “Bring us back onto our original course,” Solberg called out, then pressed a button on his armrest. “Engine room, we require full speed. Go to emergency dash as soon as you can.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” the tinny voice from the speakers announced.

  “Terrorists? This close to American waters? They have to be fucking ballsy.” Solberg shook his head in disbelief at the situation that was occurring below decks.

  ***

  The Atlantica began turning in a wide arc back toward what her compass showed as east. Her engines, designed to go up to twenty-five knots, screamed in protest as they were redlined pushing her up to twenty-seven.

  The Liliana had stopped twisting and regained control. The much faster and nimbler ferry came about and set off with a roar of engines and spray in pursuit of the cumbersome cruise ship.

  ***

  “Is there any way we can flank them or get behind?” Jack asked. He had taken two handguns—one in a thigh safari holster and the other tucked in his waistband. In his hands he held a Mossberg 500 twelve-gauge shotgun.

  “If we can get to one of the other cargo bays on the port side, we can head through to the loading bay,” one of the young security officers said.

  “Okay, let’s do that. You,” he pointed at the spokesman of the small security detail. “Lead the way, and you,” he pointed at another, “take as many magazines as you can carry and resupply the other team. Questions? No? Let’s move.”

  ***

  The Atlantica could not match the top speed nor acceleration of the Liliana, but she did have one defensive weapon she could use.

  “Come on, quickly, get it mounted!” Josef shouted at his crewmates.

  Together, they hoisted the heavy LRAD up and clamped it to the rail on the stern of the ship near the flowrider.

  The LRAD, or Long Range Acoustic Device, was Atlantica’s non-lethal anti-boarding weapon. It looked like a black hexagonal radar dish with clips on the bottom to fix it to the railing.

  “Okay, boys. We’ll fire at two hundred meters,” Josef said.

  The Liliana started toward them, barreling through the tumultuous foam wake of the cruise ship, gaining on them at a relative speed of five knots. Through his binoculars, Josef could see crew gathered on the deck of the ferry, making no efforts to hide the fact they had weapons.

  Liliana shifted to one side, striving to get out of the turbulence of Atlantica’s propeller screw wash. Reaching the crystalline blue sea she began to follow again, gaining even more speed.

  “What is she doing?” Josef muttered.

  Springing into sight from between the Liliana’s hulls, four speedboats raced toward them.

  “Shit,” Josef barked. “Focus on the lead boat.”

  Josef waited until the boat was two hundred meters away, the heavily armed men hunkered low against the spray within.

  “Fire!” Josef shouted as the speedboat reached what he judged to be the LRAD’s maximum effective range.

  The crewman who had the control box for the LRAD pressed the big red button on it.

  Josef heard a low-pitched hum coming from the device. Beyond the daylong training course he had taken on the device, he had never seen, or more accurately heard, it in action. For the men on the speedboat, the noise was completely different. A deafening wall of sound smashed into them, pulsing like a car alarm, but at an incredible volume. Two men recoiled so violently they were knocked back into the churning water. The others clasped their hands to their ears in a vain attempt to block out the noise. From this range, it was likely that some of them would be permanently deafened.

  The speedboat skewed to the side, striving to get away from the punishing LRAD cone of effect. The other boats, seeing what was happening, became wary and began to angle out of range.

  Josef pumped his fist and cried out, “Yes, you fuckers. How you like that?”

  Squinting he saw a group gathering on the roof of the Liliana. They seemed to be working on something. Lifting his binoculars, he looked closely.

  “Oh shit. Down!” Josef shouted.

  The machine gun the terrorists had secured onto the roof opened fire, sending a stream of bullets toward where the crew had placed the LRAD. One crewman was torn apart by the heavy-caliber rounds, and the railing disintegrated around them.

  Josef and his surviving companion ducked down, desperately
crawling away from the railing to escape the hail of death coming from the Liliana.

  “The LRAD!” Josef shouted, coming to a stop. “We must get it before they destroy it.”

  Crawling as low as he could back toward railing, bullets hissing overhead, Josef unclamped the LRAD stand and pulled it back down. With a thud, the heavy piece of equipment landed next to him and he started to drag it back to safety.

  ***

  “Kendricks, is it?”

  Liam looked at his phone questioningly. His security detail had reached something of an impasse with the terrorists bottled up in the loading bay. They had turned the access corridor into a kill zone for anyone who tried to get down it, still it was only a matter of time before they used one of the other exits. “To whom am I speaking?”

  “I’m Sergeant Jack Cohen, one of the passengers. I have with me some of your security team. We are going to sweep through and flank them from the bow side. We’re going to need you to keep them occupied. Can you do that for us?”

  “Jack... Sergeant. I have three men left with me, and only one of those is uninjured and none of them are soldiers—”

  “I appreciate that.” Jack’s voice was calm and measured coming through the phone. “But still, we’re going to need to clear this area out or they will break out. If they do, we are not gonna be able to contain them. We’ll lose civilians. Do you understand what I’m saying? We’re it.”

  Kendricks looked down the access corridor to the now-open hatch. A bloody corpse of one of the terrorists was slumped in the hatchway. A hand reached from around the hatch and pulled the body out of the way.

  “We’ll do what it takes, Sergeant.”

  ***

  Solberg was watching in horror on the CCTV system as his crew were dying both below decks and above. Never had he even considered the prospect of his ship being attacked, yet here that nightmare scenario was happening... and within a stone throw of America’s coast.

  “Best estimate for our distance to land?” Solberg barked.

  “Fifty nautical miles, give or take,” Maine called. “I mean, we must be around that distance.”

  “Just keep broadcasting our Mayday and don’t stop, no matter what. And engineering, keep the fucking engines redlined.”

  ***

  “Tactics, accuracy, power, and speed is what we need, people,” Jack said. His impromptu lesson in close quarters battle was being delivered at a breakneck pace. They were hunkered by the access hatch leading from one of the cargo bays into the loading area where the terrorists were holed up.

  “Tactics—we are going in; you will cover the left side,” Jack pointed at Major Leonard. He pointed at another security officer. “You right, and I’ll be center. You, there, you will be reloading cover, don’t fire until someone needs to drop a mag. Accuracy, keep your weapon up, sight picture, squeeze. Aim fast, shoot smooth. Power—we need to dominate the room, get in there fast and do not, whatever you do, hesitate. They have shown their intentions of killing us. Shoot them first and cry about it later. Use cover, but stay away from the walls. Bullets will skip straight down them and into you. You got all that?”

  The scared men and woman nodded jerkily. They were trembling with fear and adrenaline. Jack knew to give them any more information would just saturate them. He needed them fast and dynamic. CQB—Close Quarters Battle—was hard and exhausting, even with trained soldiers. With these amateurs it was likely to be a slaughter. But they had to try before the terrorists managed to break out into the rest of the ship.

  “Today you’re going to be marines, boys and girl. You’re going fight fast, hard, and with all of your might and we will defeat those terrorists. Understood?”

  Jack looked at their terrified faces. After a long moment, Major Leonard met Jack’s eyes with his own and said, “Understood.”

  “Let’s do this. Go, go, go!”

  As an impressive one, Jack and the others launched themselves through the hatch into the loading bay. Jack’s shotgun was already at port arms, the butt lodged firmly in his shoulder. Two terrorists in the room covering the door were slow to react to them coming through and Jack’s first shot smashed into the chest of one, knocking the man back. The second was winged by one of the shots, spinning around before she was caught by the fire from Major Leonard’s shotgun.

  Jack turned, racking the pump-action, and fired again at a group of four in the clear who had begun to dive for cover. Jack hit one, making a ragged mess of his chest. Leonard fired his shotgun at another group that was gathered at the opposite hatch, wounding one.

  Racking his shotgun again, Jack fired at another one that was slow to get down. The rounds caught the man in the head, turning it into a tattered ruin.

  “Keep moving,” Jack shouted at his comrades. “Kendricks, now!”

  From the access tunnel, Kendricks’s ragged group charged in. A round caught Singh, knocking him down, screaming in agony.

  Major Leonard gave a gasp. Jack glanced over to him, seeing the man’s chest was stitched with bullet holes. He slumped to his knees before falling to his side. Jack refocused; there would be time to mourn later.

  Firing the shotgun again and again, a subconscious part of Jack’s brain kept count of how many rounds he had fired. When the shotgun emptied, he dropped it, smoothly drawing his handgun from his thigh holder, and he brought it up in a weaver stance, one foot in front of the other.

  Sight picture. Jack saw a terrorist was turning to toward him in adrenaline-induced slow motion. The rear sight notch on the back of the handgun and blade at the front aligned on the man’s center of mass. Squeeze. Jack smoothly pulled back on the trigger twice. The HK45 barked. The bullets caught the man in the chest. Twisting, he saw another terrorist leaning out from behind the cover of a crate, the muzzle of the AK-47 he had raising toward Jack. Sight picture, squeeze. He fired twice at him, catching him in the neck and arm. Turning again, he saw another man firing his pistol at one of the security, and the woman went down with a scream. Sight picture, squeeze. Jack avenged the fallen woman.

  The ferocity of the counterattack which had at first stunned the aggressors now routed them. The few survivors turned and began sprinting toward the open cargo hatch, not even pausing before leaping out over the edge to the sea roaring underneath at more than twenty-five knots.

  Panting, Jack looked around at the loading bay, slick with the blood of the dead, dying, and injured.

  “Kendricks?” Jack called, turning to look at the injured officer, who stood gripping his handgun, blood running down his other arm.

  “Yeah?” Kendricks said, wincing.

  “Get your medical team in here. Start patching up the survivors.”

  Kendricks simply nodded and started speaking quickly into his phone.

  Jack limped to the edge off the cargo hatch and looked out. Receding into the distance he could see dark specks, the pirate survivors taking their chances in the sea. Looking up, he saw the ferry, circling wide, prowling out of range, obviously waiting for another chance.

  ***

  “Captain, the boarders have been repelled.” Kendricks’s voice was strained with pain over the speakers.

  “Thank you, Liam. We still have other problems though,” Solberg barked. Looking at Maine, he asked, “Distance to coastal waters?”

  “Forty miles, sir.”

  “We should have heard something from the Coast Guard by now. That goddamn ferry is still hounding us.”

  The Liliana was maneuvering behind them, twisting and turning to run parallel near the rear of the ship. There was no way that Atlantica could outmaneuver the far more agile vessel, they just had to hope they didn’t have any more tricks up their sleeve before the Coast Guard, Navy, or someone could respond.

  “Atlantica,” a voice emanated from the speakers. “I am a U.S. Navy Seahawk from the USS Paul Ignatius. We have monitored your situation. We will be on station in a few minutes. Hang on.”

  Finally, Captain Solberg gave a long exhalation. The fuck
ing Navy was arriving.

  ***

  The light grey Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk was a true workhorse of the U.S. Navy. It was a large helicopter used on just about every type of warship.

  Lieutenant Grace “Mack” McNamara loved the aircraft and her job, even if over recent years life had taken a very strange turn for her.

  “Hank,” she called over the intercom to her weapon systems operator. “You better have been keeping the 17/A serviced. Looks like we’re going to be seeing some action.”

  “Don’t you worry, ma’am. Geraldine is locked, stocked, and ready to rock,” Hank called back to Mack.

  The Seahawk thundered over the sea at 160 mph, keeping at low level. Grace kept one eye on the fuel gauge. It was at a premium these days, and despite the fact the captain had ordered her to haul ass, she didn’t want to burn one drop more than she had to.

  There, Mack saw a dot on the horizon, a thin plume of smoke above it.

  “Atlantica, this is Sierra Hotel 1-1. We have you on visual. We’ll be coming in hot. Please advise what you are facing.”

  “We have some kind of catamaran ferry full of goddamn terrorists. We have repelled some boarders but the ferry itself is still on our ass,” The thickly accented Norwegian voice answered. “They have deployed speedboats. We managed to knock one away with our LRAD but the others are still circling.”

  “Roger that, Atlantica.”

  The ship grew from a speck into the glistening white and blue leviathan it was. At three hundred and fifty meters long and nearly fifty wide, it was longer and bulkier than a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. It was studded all over its flanks with solar panels and windows, giving the ship one of the most futuristic appearances Mack had ever seen.

  Closing, and then racing down the length of the ship, Grace climbed the Seahawk, catching sight of the low-slung ferry behind.

  “What do you see, Hank?”

  “Looks like an island hopper to me. I don’t think we’ve danced before,” The weapons operator drawled back. “Got a bunch of folks gathered on the top-deck and I have four speedboats. I reckon they’re doing some SAR.”

  “We ain’t gonna just buzz ‘em. Weapons free and perforate ‘em,” Mack called.