Holding Their Own XV: Bloodlust

by Nobody, Joe

  The first of Ketchum’s raiders to stick his head inside the superstructure received a three-round greeting from Cortez’s executive officer. Pulling a hand grenade from his pocket, the attacker flung the device inside the metal enclosure and ducked for cover.

  After a loud “whoop,” a cloud of cordite smoke flashed inside, and the bandits dashed in, guns blazing.

  Three more of Cortez’s crew were slaughtered during the blitz, including the executive officer and the engineer. Those that survived, including the captain, began fighting like cornered, wounded animals.

  After emptying his revolver at the rushing buccaneers, the captain pulled a second pistol from his belt and continued to shoot downward as he retreated toward the bridge. A crude curse shrieked from below informed the skipper that at least one of his shots had found human flesh.

  One floor up, three of the desperate sailors jumped over a rail clasping long knives in their hands. Landing amid the surprised outlaws, the dim light was filled with slashing blades and the sound of gunfire echoing off the steel hulls.

  Still, the buccaneers pressed, their number now only three. Their charge was powered by an uncontrollable need for revenge… an internal rage fueled by the startling death of so many of their comrades. For them, there was only victory or death; no other outcome existed.

  The last two of Senhora ’s crew again stormed toward the invaders, but this time, the intruders climbing up the stairs were ready for the attack. A steady stream of lead slammed into Cortez’s men, neither getting close enough to inflict any damage.

  Knowing that he was now alone, the captain backed into the bridge and closed the weighty door behind him.

  He had three shots left. He was about to lose his ship.

  The steel fire door leading to the bridge presented the last of Ketchum’s men with a problem. They didn’t have any tools or torches to breach the lock. They began a frantic search for something heavy to use as a battering ram.

  Remembering the fire axe on the main deck, one of the pirates rushed back down the stairs to retrieve the instrument. As he reached the floor at the island’s bottom, a single shot rang out, slaying the biker before he could reach the opening. The ship’s second officer dropped his pistol and collapsed, his shirt having been bloodied by the grenade’s shrapnel.

  After retrieving the axe, the last two boarders began throwing heavy blows against the reinforced door. Little by little, the screws holding the old metal latch began to lose their integrity, fragments of the bulkhead sparking into the dim space. Standing his ground in front of the wheel, Cortez waited for the inevitable onslaught. They will have to step over my dead body to take the Lady, he vowed.

  When the door finally surrendered, a barrage of gunfire erupted on the bridge, both Cortez and the attackers emptying their weapons at close range.

  The captain was hit twice, adding to the damage already inflicted to his wounded shoulder. One of the pirates fell in the doorway, the other attacker clutching his chest. With a bellow of fury, the last surviving boarder charged onto the bridge, his eyes flush with insanity’s luster.

  The captain tumbled to the deck, managing one last act of defense as the life drained from his body. With his remaining strength, Cortez thrust the throttle all the way forward. “You will not have my ship!” he hissed as the pirate’s bloody hands closed around his throat.

  Pete spotted the approaching freighter first, pointing to the southeast and shouting, “There she is!”

  Bishop and Terri’s eyes followed, the outline of a ship clear in the light of dusk. “He’s just going to make it before dark,” Pete added.

  A din of excitement rose from the gathered onlookers and traders, anxious voices sounding up and down the wharf, a couple of the onlookers loudly cheering the captain’s arrival. Bishop, as was his habit, lifted his rifle to scan the approaching vessel through the magnification of his optic.

  “Why are there two boats alongside?” he asked Pete. “Are they there to help him dock?”

  Puzzled, Pete shook his head. “Not that I know of. This is something new. Maybe some of the locals decided to give Captain Cortez an escort into the port?”

  “They’re peeling away now,” Bishop responded a few moments later. “Odd.”

  The bow of the weighty vessel was pointed directly at the waiting crowd, a trail of white froth boiling from the stern clearly illuminated by the setting sun. “Shouldn’t he be slowing down?” Bishop asked, his optic still fixated on the approaching ship.

  “He’s an excellent seaman,” Pete reassured. “Cortez knows what he is doing.”

  Larger and larger the hull loomed, speeding toward the wharf. Again, Bishop voiced concern. “I don’t know squat about boats, much less piloting them, but damn he’s coming in fast.”

  At four hundred yards, with Senhora still maintaining a full head of steam, Bishop stepped to Terri’s side and scooped Hunter into his arm. “Something’s wrong,” he stated to his wife, waiting for the vessel to turn, or slow down, or at least sound its horn.

  At two hundred yards, his brain had done the math. There was no way now the ship could avoid the pier. “Run!” Bishop shouted to Terri and Pete. “Run like hell!” With Hunter tucked in the crook of one arm, Bishop grabbed his wife’s hand, hoping to steer his family out of harm’s way. Recognizing the panicked expression in her mate’s eyes, Terri’s legs began pumping like she was running in a track meet.

  Awestruck by the incredulous sight, Pete stood mesmerized by the rapidly approaching ship-torpedo.

  As he scurried past his employer, Bishop repeated his warning. “Run, boss! Get the hell out of here!”

  The four visitors from the Alliance scrambled toward the warehouses and away from the water’s edge. Rounding the corner of the nearest building, they stopped and looked back at Senhora ’s looming bow.

  The ship slammed into the pier, a thunderous roar of grinding, ripping metal, and crushed concrete splitting the Texas night. The ground shook, chunks of steel plating turned into flying slices of destruction the size of a car’s door. Bishop watched in horror as the impact lifted the stern into the air, the huge propeller breaching the surface and hurling a shower of water high into the light. Spectators darted in all directions; their mouths open in cries of distress, their desperate throats drowned by the protests of the doomed vessel and wounded wharf.

  The warehouse directly in the Lady ’s path was shredded with fragments from the hull and dock… jagged, whirling sheets of metal slicing through the air like the shrapnel from a warhead, chunks of concrete blasting into the scattering crowd.

  Given the kinetic energy of the fastmoving boat striking the unyielding wharf, Senhora bounced off the pier and then continued her onslaught just forty yards further to the west. Again, her engines drove the damaged stern into the shoreline, another thunderclap of destruction washing over the spectators.

  The momentum of the powerful impact pushed her more parallel with the wharf’s edge. Her course having been altered, now her angle wasn’t as direct. Forward she sped, sending a horrific screeching into the night as hundreds of tons of steel ground against the reinforced dock.

  She traveled two hundred yards before plowing into an even larger oil tanker docked there. Now pinned between the raised wharf and the bow of the massive ship, Senhora had no place to go. Other than the thrashing of her propellers and the boiling white water at her stern, there was no movement on her decks or bridge.

  After handing a frightened, confused Hunter to his mother, Bishop moved toward Pete and asked, “You okay, boss?”

  “I’m fine,” Pete replied with frustration. “What in the hell is going on, Bishop?”

  “I don’t know, but somebody needs to get on board that ship and shut her engines down. She could break loose at any moment, and who knows how much damage she could do.”

  “Let’s go!” Pete replied, clearly worried about his friend, the captain.

  With his weapon over his shoulder, Bishop began hurrying toward the w
ounded freighter. The vessel, from his perspective, was intimidating, its hull looming over the pier like a teetering, three-story building. “This is what the caveman felt as he charged the mammoth,” he whispered under his breath.

  As he rushed past the stern, the sound of the propeller thrashing and splashing sent a chill up Bishop’s spine. There was a vibration of power and force here, in a place where none should be. It was too near, too prevailing, too overwhelming for such close quarters. It took all of his willpower not to turn and run in the opposite direction.

  The haunting groans of the ship’s stressed plating assaulted his ears just as he made it to the bow, Senhora ’s engine working to push her forward, trying to wedge her nose in deeper between the tanker and the wharf. The huge dock lines holding the oil carrier were straining to keep her in her berth. If one of those massive ropes surrendered….

  Finally, reaching the intersection of the two vessels, Bishop pulled up and began searching for some way to board the Brazilian ship. While her bow was so tight against the peer that he could have reached out and touched the hull, there was no ladder or gangplank in sight. He was looking up at a sheer, vertical face of rusty steel…. a man-made mountain that was straining to be free and might go in any direction once released.

  His gaze then turned to the larger oil tanker. That ship was at least two stories taller than Senhora , the jutting point of her bow like a cliff hanging over the smaller vessel below. There was no way he could drop from there down to the wounded freighter’s deck; the distance was too far to make the jump and live to tell about it.

  Pete caught up just then, sweat pouring from his brow. “I can’t see a way to get aboard,” Bishop yelled over the grinding, screeching background noise.

  Pointing at the ruptured, twisted metal of Senhora ’s bow, Pete announced, “She’s taking on water… a lot of water. Eventually, the engine compartment will flood, won’t it?”

  Sure enough, Bishop noted Senhora was already tilting down in the front. Swirls of current around a truck-sized hole in the bow invited the sea to take her. Captain Cortez’s ship was sinking.

  One last time, Bishop scanned the oil tanker, wondering if he could find a rope and scale down from the higher deck. If Senhora got loose, or one of the dock lines gave at just the wrong moment, he could be left dangling above the water, or worse yet, crushed between the two steel behemoths.

  Turning back to gaze at Terri and Hunter, Pete’s head of security shook his head. He’d taken too many risks in the last few weeks. It was unlikely anybody was alive on the Brazilian vessel or they would have avoided the collision with the dock. Pick your battles , he thought. This isn’t a worthy fight.

  As if he could read his friend’s mind, Pete shook his head. “It’s not worth it, Bishop. We’ll just have to wait until the engine floods. She’ll sink right here by the pier, and then we can figure out a way to get aboard.”

  “I agree,” Bishop responded flatly, pivoting to get back to his wife and child. “We should move everybody away, just in case something else goes wrong. The engine might explode, or the flooding could shift her course. That thing is way too big, powerful, and unpredictable for us to be standing next to her.”

  For the next hour, the bystanders watched a slow-motion disaster unfold before their eyes. Most of the gathered traders had seen movies of sinking ships, but none had ever had a front row seat to the demise of such a large vessel. Slowly, but surely, more and more of Senhora ’s hull disappeared beneath the murky water of Port Arthur.

  It was precisely ninety-six minutes later when a loud bang sounded inside the wounded vessel. Smoke poured from the funnel, then another series of gut-wrenching mechanical whines, pops and hisses signaled the failure of the freighter’s immense diesel engine. An eerie silence fell over the pier.

  To counteract the darkness, one of the locals pulled his SUV closer to the wharf and turned on his bright headlights. A few minutes later, a line of pickups and delivery trucks had joined the illumination effort. The Lady continued to sink, inch by inch of her hull slipping below the water as she came to her final resting place in the mud.

  At the two-hour mark, Bishop noticed[E1] that the ship’s settling into the silty bottom had brought her ladder closer to shore. A short time later, the metal rungs welded to the hull were in reach. “I’m going to board her. Just to make sure there’s not somebody hurt in there,” the security man announced to Terri and Pete.

  “I’ll go with you,” Pete responded. “I may not be a fast as I once was, but I can still help.”

  “Pete, we don’t know what happened to the crew. There might have been a mutiny, or one of the sailors might have lost his mind and shot everybody up. My job is to protect you. Let me go alone. I’ll shout down an update just as soon as I know anything.”

  “Okay. I get it. You don’t want the fat, old man slowing you down,” Pete nodded. “Go. Check it out. Let us know what’s going on as soon as you can.”

  Putting an arm around his employer and friend, Bishop winked and responded, “Don’t be ridiculous, Pete, you’re not fat.”

  Bishop then bent and kissed a disapproving Terri on the cheek. “I love you. I’ll be right back and try not to worry.”

  “Be careful, my love,” she whispered. “I love you, too.”

  The rungs were slicker than Bishop expected, the security expert having to take his time as he climbed. As he moved slowly up the ship’s shell, he realized he was carrying very little ammunition. There was a full mag in his carbine, a spare in his back pocket. A flashlight and his fighting knife were on his belt.

  As he reached the top, Bishop did what he always did before exposing his body. His head popped up over the rail for a mental snapshot and then disappeared, hopefully, before any aggressor could get off a shot.

  He couldn’t see much of anything on the deck, the darkness denying him many details. There were crates, rope, and curved vents in his immediate view. Plenty of places for an ambusher to conceal himself.

  Gathering his wits, he took a deep breath and pulled himself quickly over the rail. An instant later, he dove hard to the deck, every muscle tense in anticipation of a bullet tearing into his flesh. No lead flew his way.

  Bishop reached out with his senses, trying to expand the sights, sounds, and even the smells drifting through the fresh, sea air. The deck, from his vantage, looked like a tornado had strewn debris everywhere. “The impact with the pier,” the West Texan reasoned.

  Moving to an overturned stack of crates, Bishop reached for his flashlight just as his boot kicked something metallic and sent it cascading across the deck. He knew what it was before the small circle of his light illuminated a spent shell casing. There had been gunfire on board the Senhora .

  With just a sliver of his face peeking around the wooden containers, Bishop swept the immediate area with his torch. He noticed several shiny, brass casings in the beam before arriving at the lower legs of a body partially obscured by an overturned barrel.

  Reasonably sure no one was in the immediate area, Bishop rushed to the downed man.

  Once closer, he realized he was looking at a dead crewman, the fellow’s pasty skin color and crimson-stained clothing evidence of his demise. Two bullet holes marked his chest; his lifeless eyes pointed skyward. The pool of blood under his body was still sticky. “This must have happened right before the Senhora came into view,” the ex-contractor whispered, his eyes scanning the deck.

  Instinct pointed Bishop toward the bridge. It only made sense that the vessel’s headquarters would be the location where most of the action had occurred. If Captain Cortez or any of his men were still alive, that’s where they would most likely be.

  Halfway to the superstructure, Bishop encountered another body. This man had an AR15 dangling from a sling around his chest. A good-sized bullet hole marked his forehead.

  “I doubt this fellow was a member of the regular crew,” Bishop said as he studied the body lying at his feet. The guy was wearing combat boots, not dec
k shoes. He carried two magazines of US Army-issued green tip ammunition tucked inside his belt, and it was very unlikely a Brazilian sailor would be issued such specialized ammo. Bishop picked up the ammo and added it to his limited supply.

  Cautiously rising, Bishop cut and darted toward the tower at Senhora ’s stern. Finally reaching the base, he shined his light into the doorway and sucked in a chest full of air – it was as if he was looking at a slaughterhouse.

  A helter-skelter of jumbled carnage appeared in the beam from his flashlight. Haphazard splashes of blood streamed down the walls. Lifeless corpses were sprawled before him at twisted, impossible angles, their positions indicative of something that Bishop had seen before. These men had died in vicious, desperate, hand-to-hand combat.

  He counted at least four causalities, and like the cadavers he had seen on the deck, they appeared to be a mixture of crew and… and pirates!

  “Somebody tried to take the good captain’s ship,” he whispered. “And the crew fought back.”

  Most of the men strewn across the deck were young, and his experience told him that this probably hadn’t been the site of the last battle. Taking a deep breath and bringing his weapon high, Bishop ducked inside and began climbing the stairs.

  Another body lay in front of him, a ghastly expression of absolute agony imprinted on the victim’s face. An enormous blade was embedded in the gent’s throat, a trickle of blood still dripping on the floor.

  As he ascended, Bishop encountered more spectral remains, all of them having come to a brutal demise. “This was one hell of a fight,” he mumbled. “Up close and personal in confined spaces. That’s always the worst.”

  Finally reaching the top deck, Bishop’s flashlight highlighted the sole passageway. The heavy, steel door had been aggressively attacked, a fire axe lying amongst the shards of debris. The carcass of another of the captain’s men blocked the entrance. “This was the crew’s Alamo – their last stand.”

  Bishop hesitated before entering the bridge, cautiously checking each angle of sight from the doorway. He could see the ship’s wheel inside, as well as a control panel littered with gauges and switches. His ears strained for any sound of movement. His body tensed as he reminded himself that this had to be where the clash concluded.