Deadly Coast (A Tom Dugan Novel)

by R. E. McDermott

  “We can flush off under that water,” Dugan shouted to Borgdanov over the noise of the downpour. “Then we can take these damned masks off. I doubt there’s any airborne dust floating around in this mess. Remember to flush your gloves and boots well too—just in case—and don’t touch your face. Tell Ilya.”

  Borgdanov nodded and turned to the sergeant, as Dugan crawled under the powerful stream. He turned his face up, staying there through several surges, as the water gushed over him from head to toe. Then he held his gloved hands under the flood, rubbing them vigorously to flush any residue off their slick surface. He looked to his right and saw the Russians similarly engaged, then stripped off his gas mask and closed his eyes before turning his bare face back into the stream. He crawled out of the direct stream and opened his eyes, blinking furiously and fighting an urge to wipe his eyes. He’d been in the suit less than two hours, but it seemed like two days, and the cool water on his face was comforting, even under the circumstances. His respite was cut short by the sound of approaching outboards, and Dugan shouted for the others to get down.

  The pirates approached like a band of howling Comanches, their swift boats speeding up swells and crashing down the other side. The first boats drew close and cut their speed to match that of the wallowing drillship, and the more daring of the pirates balanced in their boats, timing the movement of the big ship. At the bottom of Ocean Goliath’s port roll, several leaped to catch the bottom handrail and hauled themselves aboard.

  Dugan’s guess the pirates would be distracted by the silver was correct, and the first aboard screamed through the rain to their brethren, alerting them to their great good fortune. Here and there, pirates in the boats fired celebratory shots into the air.

  Waabberi balanced on the shifting layer of silver as the big ship rolled, his initial exuberance at discovering the treasure mitigated by sudden terror as the port rail dipped toward the water and metallic clanging filled the air from the derrick. Something was very wrong. There was no evidence of Mukhtar or anyone, and the ship was close to capsizing. They couldn’t stay here long, but—he looked down at his feet—he wouldn’t abandon this treasure. He turned to the men beside him.

  “You,” he said, “position four men halfway between here and the deckhouse. If Mukhtar and his fanatics are about, I don’t want to be taken by surprise.” The man nodded and rushed to do as ordered, and Waabberi turned to the second man.

  “We don’t have long,” he said, “and we must save the silver. Have the men scoop it up and dump it in the boats.”

  The man looked out at the seas. “The silver’s heavy. We can’t load the boats so heavily in these seas.”

  “The mother ships will be here in an hour, maybe two,” said Waabberi. “Load the boats and shelter in the lee of the drillship until they arrive. Her hull is breaking the waves a bit. Even if she rolls over, she’ll float awhile. We’ll be all right as long as no one is in the shadow of the derrick when she goes over.”

  The man looked doubtful, and Waabberi lost his patience.

  “Don’t question me!” he screamed. “Get moving! Now!”

  The man glanced at Waabberi’s hand moving toward the pistol in his waistband, and turned away.

  “At once, Waabberi,” he said over his shoulder, and began to shout orders.

  Soon pirates swarmed aboard with empty backpacks, having hastily emptied ammunition bags and anything else that could hold coins. Those without containers spread their shirts on deck and piled coins to be gathered into bundles. The drivers stayed in the boats, circling on the stormy seas, waiting their turn to nose up to the ship to take on silver.

  Dugan squatted at the corner of the machinery casing and peered through the pouring rain at the controlled chaos. He felt Borgdanov beside him.

  “What do you think, Dyed?”

  “They’re pretty occupied. If we had a boat, we could slip away. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to get one.”

  “Lifeboats?”

  “They’ll all be forward near the quarters. There are life rafts back here, but I don’t think we can slip away from these guys in a raft. And besides. We’ll never catch Kwok in a raft.”

  As they spoke, the first boat moved away from the side to make room for the next. It was a semirigid inflatable, visible through the driving rain as it wallowed up a swell and circled close in the relatively calmer waters beside the rolling drillship.

  “That’s it!” Dugan said, pointing to the boat. “He’s loaded and staying in the lee of the hull. My bet is he’ll wait for the others back here beside the stern. He’ll be by himself until another boat is loaded. That’s our shot.”

  Borgdanov nodded and motioned Dugan back out of sight behind the machinery-casing bulkhead. The Russians conversed in hush tones, the sergeant looking doubtful, then nodding in reluctant concurrence. Borgdanov turned to Dugan.

  “Ilya will go first without weapon,” he said. “He must take out pirate without attracting attention, or we have little chance. After Ilya captures boat, you and I jump and he picks us up. If we are lucky, we sneak away in rain without being seen.”

  “And if we aren’t lucky?” Dugan asked.

  Borgdanov shrugged. “You and I will have weapons. We empty them at pirates to keep their heads down and maybe make them a little cautious. Then we jump and hope for best.” He looked at the sergeant, then turned back to Dugan. “This you should know, Dyed. Ilya and I do not surrender, no matter what. Russian military is not so kind to piraty, so I think they will not be so kind to us.”

  “You’re out of uniform, how will they know?”

  Borgdanov shrugged. “We both have unit tattoos. Sooner or later, they will figure it out. Then it will not go so well with us. But you are American. You, I think, they hold for ransom.”

  “Thanks for the thought,” Dugan said. “But apart from the Fruit of the Loom label in my underwear, I suspect we’re all going to look alike to these guys.”

  Borgdanov smiled and clapped Dugan on the shoulder. “Is true, and also I now remember I make you honorary Russian. So, tovarishch, do you want rifle or Glock?”

  Dugan shrugged. “I doubt I’ll hit anything anyway, but I have a better chance with the rifle.”

  The sergeant passed Dugan the assault rifle, as Borgdanov dug in his backpack for the Glock, the spare magazines, and a roll of duct tape he used to tape the magazines to his thigh. Dugan held the unfamiliar weapon and looked back and forth at the Russians, then down at himself and his bright orange suit, and wondered if this was how the redcoats felt.

  He heard the muted mutter of the outboard now as the pirate boat crept along beside the ship at two knots. Borgdanov dug in his backpack again and pulled out a small mirror on a collapsible extension, and then discarded the backpack on the deck. He pulled the extension out full length, and then crouched low and crept near the port side, examining the water near the ship. He nodded and motioned the others to join him.

  “Is good,” Borgdanov said. “He is very close. And he looks forward, at the others, not up. I think we can make nice surprise for him, da?”

  Dugan nodded, and Borgdanov spoke to the sergeant. On the next roll upright, both Russians stood and moved to the rail, and Dugan followed suit. The sergeant scampered over the rail and stood with his heels on the deck edge, holding the rail behind him.

  Dugan looked down and saw the pirate in the boat below him, just as Borgdanov had described, oblivious to their presence. The ship rolled back to port, and the sergeant timed his drop perfectly at the lowest point of the roll, a mere ten feet above the pirate’s head. He entered the water feet first beside the boat, close enough to grab the side as he flashed by the startled pirate. His head submerged, but he kept his hands on the edge of the boat, and heaved himself upward, propelled by both his tremendous arm strength and the additional buoyancy of the survival suit.

  The Russian shot out of the water like an orange porpoise, and flopped far enough into the boat to wrap his massive right hand around th
e pirate’s bicep. He fell back into the water, attempting to drag the pirate with him, but the terrified man clung to the tiller of the outboard, pulling it hard over and sending the boat into a tight circle, as he found his voice and began to scream. Desperate to silence the pirate, the sergeant gave a mighty heave and pulled the man into the water, then clung to the boat with his left hand as he held the now-thrashing pirate underwater with his right.

  Dugan and Borgdanov watched as the tightly circling boat slipped astern, no longer matching the drillship’s speed. Dugan looked forward, relieved no one seemed to have heard the pirate’s cries.

  “I must help Ilya,” Borgdanov said. “Stay here, Dyed. We will be back with boat.” Without waiting for Dugan’s concurrence, he slipped over the rail and dropped into the sea.

  Terrific. Dugan looked after the boat, alone on a sinking ship with three dozen bloodthirsty pirates. He was moving back to the shelter of the machinery casing when they spotted him. He saw one of the pirates shout, then point, and several moved down the deck toward him. His first instinct was to run, but there was nowhere to go, and if he jumped overboard, he’d draw attention to the Russians and the boat, and both he and the Russians would make nice orange targets for pirates shooting off the stern. No, the best option was to keep them forward awhile. If they didn’t see him jump overboard, they might be cautious about charging aft. And every second they delayed, the drillship would move away, increasing the range.

  Dugan raised the assault rifle and opened fire, sending pirates scrambling for cover. His fire was indiscriminate—he had no illusions about his own marksmanship—and he emptied the magazine in seconds before moving to the cover of the machinery casing. Out of sight, he moved aft, keeping the bulk of the machinery casing between him and any approaching pirates. At the stern rail, he dropped the now-useless rifle overboard and crawled over the rail to drop feet first into the water.

  “Is it one of Mukhtar’s fanatics?” Waabberi asked.

  “I don’t think so. He was a big white man in orange coveralls with a hood.”

  Waabberi scratched his chin. “One of the crew then. But where did he get the weapon? Crews aren’t normally armed.”

  His underling shrugged. “Perhaps he took it from one of the fanatics.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Waabberi said, looking up at the derrick as the ship started another roll to port. “Put one man on guard in case he returns, and get everyone else back to the silver. We don’t have time to waste on—”

  He ducked at the crack of a gunshot, then realized it wasn’t a shot at all, but the forward mooring line on the doomed Yemeni fishing boat parting at last. Deprived of this last crucial bit of support, the boat’s bow dipped below a swell, and the forward motion of the drillship drove it deeper still, increasing the load on the remaining forward lines that, stretched to the limit of their elasticity, snapped in quick succession. Attached to the drillship now by only her stern lines, the bow of the boat swung away from the hull, and for one critical moment, the sinking boat acted as a rudder.

  The big ship veered to port, at the very bottom of her port roll, and never recovered. The rest of the drill pipe in the derrick broke free to join the loose single string that had been producing the doleful clanging, and the ship pitched on her side, spilling pirates and silver into the storm-tossed sea. Despite Waabberi’s warning, two of the boats were caught in the shadow of the derrick and disappeared, while the rest sped away from the ship in panic, then returned to circle the sinking ship, like flies disturbed from a dead carcass.

  Dugan plunged through the water, turned end over end in the powerful prop wash from the drillship’s thrusters. He felt a moment of disorientation and panic, but then he was free of the turbulence and the buoyancy of the survival suit carried him to the surface. He panicked again when his head broke the water, and he looked around in the driving rain. His visual range in the water was considerably less than it had been from the higher vantage point on the ship, and it was reduced even further as he bobbed up and down in the waves. How would he find the Russians? Even the huge ship was becoming a blur as it moved through the rain away from him and intermittently disappeared as he got caught in wave troughs.

  A massive groan reached him, like the death rattle of some great beast, and he rode up on the crest of a wave in time to see the dim outline of Ocean Goliath rolling over. Then things went quiet, the only sound the hiss of the rain on the water.

  And Dugan felt very, very alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Kyung Yang No. 173

  Arabian Sea

  Kwok looked aft and eyed the edge of the rainsquall, now stretched across the near horizon like a gray-white curtain, obscuring his view of the threat he was trying so desperately to escape. The storm front had passed with remarkable speed, and Kyung Yang No. 173 had run out of it, into clear skies and troubled but calming seas. She struggled over a big wave as Kwok turned to watch the helmsman fight the wheel, compensating for the increasing starboard list.

  Kwok dropped his gaze to the Russian bound on the deck, blood dried on the side of his head, glaring up at Kwok with hate in his eyes. Kwok ignored him and looked back out to sea, as he mentally parsed the possible outcomes of his current situation. His reverie was disturbed by hurried footsteps on the stairs, and moments later the chief engineer burst into the wheelhouse, soaking wet and dripping water on the deck.

  “I found the leak!” the chief said in Korean, “but we must—”

  “Is it fixed?” Kwok asked.

  The engineer shook his head and tried to speak, but Kwok cut him off.

  “Why not? Can you do it?”

  The chief nodded. “Yes, but I must —”

  Kwok exploded. “Then don’t stand here talking to me! Repair it at once! Why’d you even come here?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” the chief said. “It’s the most forward of the concrete patches the Americans placed. They left some materials onboard, so I think I can make the repair, but the force of the water against the hull is making the leak worse. I must slow it down a lot before I can hope to patch it. We must reduce speed until I can get it patched and the concrete sets.”

  Kwok looked back, as if trying to peer through the curtain of rain.

  “Out of the question,” he said. “The pirates could overtake us and capture us before the Russians arrive. We must get as far away from them as possible.”

  “And if the boat sinks?” the chief asked.

  “Then we take to the raft,” Kwok said. “The Russians should be here anytime to rescue us.”

  “And how do you intend to explain abandoning their countrymen, or the fact that we’re floating around in a raft with a bound Russian?”

  Kwok shrugged. “Dugan and the other two fools won’t survive the pirates, so no one will know we abandoned anyone, and as far as our friend here goes”—he looked down at the Russian—”I don’t think he’ll be joining us in the raft. I suspect he’ll drown if the ship sinks, or perhaps fall over the side before then.”

  The chief glared at Kwok. “We didn’t abandon anyone, Captain. You’re the one who ran away.”

  “And saved your neck in the process, you ungrateful fool,” Kwok said.

  “I doubt it was my neck you were concerned with,” the chief said. “And it remains to be seen whether you saved any of us. Besides, running away is one thing; murder to cover it up is quite another.”

  “I’ll deal with the Russian as I see fit,” Kwok said. “Now stop your insubordination and get below and fix the leak. Without stopping the engine. Is that clear?”

  “But I can’t—”

  “I said, is that CLEAR?” Kwok screamed.

  The chief fixed Kwok with a silent glare. “I’ll try,” he said at last, and turned to the stairs.

  Arabian Sea

  Astern of capsized Ocean Goliath

  Dugan bobbed in the water and fought rising panic. Staying afloat was no problem in the suit, but that was about the only
positive. He imagined a slow death, floating around without food or water—unless, of course, a shark happened along. He compartmentalized his fear and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

  Visibility was awful. The raindrops whipped the sea into a fine mist a few inches above the water—inconsequential if you were in a boat, but blinding if the only thing above water was your head. Each time a wave lifted him, Dugan fought to lift his head higher and swiveled it frantically, hoping to catch sight of the Russians. He slipped back into each trough disappointed.

  Then he heard it—the muted mutter of an idling outboard. On the next crest, he looked toward the sound and glimpsed a flash of orange before he tumbled back between the waves.

  “Help! I’m here,” he cried on the next crest.

  “I hear you, Dyed,” came the reply. “Keep shouting!”

  Moments later, the boat almost ran over him as it crested a wave and crashed down toward him. It sheared away at the last minute, and then it was beside him, and Borgdanov pulled him in. Dugan lay with his back against a mound of coins.

  “It’s good to see you guys,” he said, looking around. “Wherever the hell we are. I think I drifted quite a ways after the ship went over.”

  Borgdanov pointed through the rain. “Ship is there. Maybe five hundred meters away. We were closer just before she turned over, but still, we could barely see ship. But we heard gunfire and saw flash of orange and think maybe you jump in water. We have been searching.”

  Dugan nodded. “Thanks,” he said, as he looked around.

  The boat was heavy, plowing through the confused seas rather than riding over them, and the sergeant was fighting the tiller of the outboard to keep her from broaching sideways to the swell. Dugan turned to Borgdanov.

  “What’s our situation?”

  “I lost Glock when I jumped” Borgdanov said. “But some piraty left weapons in boat when they go to take silver. We have two AKs and one RPG.” He shrugged. “Fuel, not so much, but I think we have enough to catch Kwok. Anyway, we must try, da? You remember which way he goes?”