Crimson Waters

by James Axler

  Unfortunately, the distant emplacement was identical to the one he and his friends had just suppressed, with a Browning that shot farther and hit harder than his.

  Even as he was eyeballing the proper elevation to fire at the distant gun emplacement, he saw a big yellow ball of flame blossom toward him. The burst missed high. As J.B. brought his own weapon to point at the flickering ball of light, the half-inch slugs passed overhead with a rushing noise like wind in the rafters of a tumbledown shack. A moment later the muzzle thunder rumbled to his ears.

  His companions looked toward the far machine gun, which flamed again. This time the shots fell short by a good hundred yards, though they sent up white geysers of spray as high as the Wailer’s tall mast.

  “I take it they stand a substantially better chance of damaging us than we have of silencing them,” Doc said.

  “You might say that,” J.B. replied. “’Specially since they just bracketed us. They ought to have the range now.”

  J.B. felt the diesel thrum deepen and grow stronger. The ship began to pick up speed, turning hard to port just as the distant .50-caliber weapon cut loose again. The shots roared low overhead.

  J.B. nodded, waiting for the gun to cool. Ace timing, Ryan, he thought. Had Ryan not turned the craft sharply just when he did, the burst would’ve caught them.

  From aft came a strange, short rush of noise. Suddenly a light flared, about a hundred feet south of the ship’s port side. With a buzzing roar it streaked toward the distant enemy.

  The .50-caliber machine gun continued to blast at them. A hit on the deck between the mount and the prow knocked up a three-foot splinter of plank. J.B. grimaced, waiting for the inevitable....

  A brighter flash suddenly overrode the big machine gun’s muzzle flare, which immediately went out in the double flash of a tandem warhead.

  Through residual ringing in his ears, J.B. heard a shouted “Yes!” from astern.

  He grinned. It was unmistakably Mildred’s voice. He stayed alert, waiting for the other machine gun to open up again.

  “Did you see that?” Mildred approached him from between the portside railing and the cabin’s streamlined flank. “Did you see that? Nailed those mothers.”

  “What in Gaia’s name are you carrying, Mildred?” Krysty asked mildly.

  Mildred swung a thick, stubby tube with a ring for its back end that almost doubled its width off her shoulder. J.B.’s brows shot up. He recognized it, sure enough.

  “This?” She slapped the side of the tube, grinning. “Only an FGM-148 antitank missile, otherwise known as a Javelin. They were the hot new thing with the U.S. military when I went under the knife.”

  “Pirates must use them to convince ships to stop when the machine gun doesn’t work,” J.B. said, nodding approval. “Somebody must have looted a stash.”

  “How did you ever learn to shoot one of those?” Krysty asked.

  Mildred laughed. “J.B. isn’t the only one who knows weapons!” She grinned. “Also it has a little cartoon on the side with instructions.”

  “So may I take it, ladies,” Doc said, as if nothing untoward had been happening, “that yonder villains are no longer liable to afflict us?”

  “Yonder villains got their asses blown up,” Mildred replied.

  “Ace,” Jak said, padding up to them.

  “Good job!”

  Heads turned. Ryan looked out a port in the front of the cabin where the bridge was.

  “Somebody better go check for damage double-quick,” he shouted. “Bastards ripped us pretty good a couple of times.”

  Jak nodded, frowning. “Smell fuel. Stinks.”

  “Fireblast!” Ryan said. “Somebody jump on that. If we’re going to have to swim to Puerto Rico, I want to know about it now!”

  Chapter Ten

  “They’re still behind us, Ryan,” Mildred called from the stern where she was keeping lookout in the afternoon sun.

  Ryan grunted. He hadn’t expected the pirates—or the Monitors—to give up pursuit.

  Ahead the island of Puerto Rico rose from blue ocean like a fuzzy green iceberg.

  “At least we’re almost to Nuestra Señora,” Krysty said from the open hatchway.

  “Good thing, too,” he said, “because we’re running on fumes as it is.”

  The big machine gun had holed them a dozen times before they’d been able to use the Javelin to put it out of commission. But, big as .50-caliber slugs were, it took a lot of them to damage a yacht. The few holes the bullets had punched below the waterline had been easy to plug.

  But they could also hit something vital that was smaller than the entire hull, and one had punctured the portside fuel tank. They had just enough in the starboard tank to make the run from NuTuga to their destination.

  “Are they gaining on us, Krysty?” he asked.

  “No, lover.”

  “That’s something, anyway.”

  “If the charts that our unwilling hosts so thoughtfully provided are correct,” said Doc from the map table near the wheel, “we should come in sight of the ville for which we are headed as soon as we round this promontory.”

  “Thanks,” Ryan said.

  He guessed the charts were accurate. Whatever else you could say about the Sea Wasp Posse, they apparently knew their business and took it seriously. They were successful, after all.

  It turned out they made and maintained careful charts of the whole West Indies. That included careful annotations as to both targets and dangers. Like a lot of Puerto Rican ports, the ville of Nuestra Señora offered both. It was prosperous, as such places went, though a lot less grand than NuTuga. But the people were also relatively well armed and vigorous about defending the place.

  As tough as the Sea Wasps were, they were also smart. They knew to look elsewhere for easier prey.

  Which made Nuestra Señora an ideal port of call for Ryan and company, in their current circumstances. Provided the locals could be persuaded to regard them as anything but coldhearts, of course.

  “Take the helm, Doc,” Ryan said. “I want to go check on our friends back there.”

  “Certainly, my dear Ryan.”

  Doc moved behind the console of instruments and blinking lights, only some of which worked. He had his coat off and his shirtsleeves rolled up, exposing his bony white wrists. The old man seemed alert and focused, moving more like a man younger than Ryan—his real age, as opposed to his apparent one.

  “A stern chase is a long chase, my naval acquaintances told me back in my day,” he said as Ryan started out of the cabin.

  “Yeah. Reckon that’s why we’re still breathing.”

  He went out blinking into the bright morning light. The sun had risen a couple of hours before. They had run the engine as fast as they dared all night. They couldn’t redline it; if it failed before it had done its job they were stone chilled. Which restricted them to maybe twenty miles per hour.

  From the cabin door Ryan glanced at Jak, alone in the prow, his long white hair streaming off to the side like a banner. Ryan grinned. He thought the kid looked like the hero from an ancient sword-and-sorcery paperback he’d read as a boy in Front Royal.

  The one-eyed man turned aft and walked toward the squared-off stern, where J.B. and Krysty stood by the railing gazing back along their wake. Jak declined to join them, claiming he was only interested in looking ahead. Ryan could see his point. Watching the pursuit creep slowly up on them wouldn’t load any blasters for them. Or make them feel better about life.

  “How’s it going?” Ryan asked his companions.

  Krysty turned, flashed him a big smile and gave him a quick kiss.

  J.B. stood peering through Ryan’s Navy longeyes at the lone ship steaming in pursuit. It was another yacht like the one they rode, though mebbe a few feet shorter.

  “Still gaining?” Ryan asked.

  “Yeah,” J.B. said. “Slow but sure.” The vessel’s white prow, with its white mustache of foam, was about a mile and a half astern.

&nbs
p; “If this ville we’re headed for’s where their charts say, we should get there with room to spare,” J.B. said. “’Course, if it isn’t, we’re liable to run out of fuel, anyway.”

  “Still just the one?” Ryan slipped his arm around Krysty. She snuggled in next to him.

  “No sign of the other two.” A trio of vessels had managed to power forth from NuTuga harbor to chase the stolen yacht.

  “Don’t reckon they could catch up, anyway,” Ryan said. “If they could, they would have caught us already. Not sure that the first one to give up is even still afloat.”

  J.B. chuckled. No one aboard the Wailer had any way of knowing what exactly had happened. But somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, flames had suddenly flared up on one of the three enemy ships, a much smaller schooner. It had fallen broadside to them; the binocs showed frantic activity silhouetted by yellow flames leaping ever higher as the crew tried to fight the blaze. It could’ve been anything, from a catastrophic engine overheat to some triple-stupe smoking a spliff while cleaning engine parts with gasoline.

  Neither of the other pursuers had paused to help their buddies. Well, Ryan thought, they don’t call ’em coldhearts for nothin’. Sometime between then and dawn the other ship had dropped back and been lost to sight, again for reasons unknown.

  Which left the lead vessel. Ryan took the longeyes from his friend, adjusted their spacing and focus, then grunted. They’d way overcrewed the sleek motor sailer, which was common pirate practice. Judging by some black outfits on the crew lounging around the railing, they did have some Monitors among them. There were at least twenty of the bastards aboard. Standing in the bow—where, as far as anyone could tell, he had stood all night—was Silver-Eye Chris himself, looking like grim death.

  Even through the powerful glass, the pirate chief’s face was just a pale blur. Ryan didn’t need to see his expression to know it.

  “Reckon that bastard would keep after us if his damn ship was afire stem to stern,” J.B. said, intuiting the object of Ryan’s attention. “Even if his dreads were burning like so many candles.”

  “He has motivation,” Krysty agreed.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Ryan said. “Any idea yet what that thing is under the tarp behind him?”

  “It’s either a heavy weapon or a mount for one,” J.B. replied. “It has to be, or pretty near, on a pirate ship like that. Otherwise they’d’ve unbolted whatever it is, and sold it on the beach or chucked it overboard.”

  “If it’s a heavy weapons mount, wouldn’t they have mounted the weapon already?” Krysty asked.

  “Mebbe not,” Ryan said. “If it was a machine gun, say. Like the one we had. Or the bigger bastard firing at us last night.”

  They had unbolted the Browning and its mount from the deck and pitched them into the sea. As J.B. feared, he’d burned out the barrel during the final exchange with the distant shore gun. A flashlight inspection of the bore revealed he’d shot out the rifling and had fired at least a few rounds as if it were a shotgun or a crude black powder musket. Without grooves to impart a spin, the bullets tumbled pretty much right out of the muzzle and splashed down any which way in the water, probably no farther than fifty yards away.

  There had been no spare barrel in stowage. Nor was there a reload rocket for Mildred’s new launcher. Somehow Ryan couldn’t bring himself to grouse about the luck; they’d had more than they deserved, maybe, to get away as clean as they did.

  J.B. thumbed up the brim of his fedora to scratch his forehead. Sweat was running down his face.

  “If you held my feet to the fire,” he said, “I’d guess it’s a mortar of some kind. Eighty-one millimeters, most likely. That’s what the old U.S. military used.”

  Ryan frowned. An 81 mm mortar would be bad enough. But things could get plenty worse.

  “Could it be a four-deuce?”

  J.B. grunted. “I can’t rightly say yea or nay,” he said. “But I doubt they could reinforce the deck enough that a four-point-two-inch mortar wouldn’t punch right on through with the recoil.”

  A 4.2-inch mortar was serious ordnance. It shot a long way and a solid hit would basically blast the Wailer to flaming splinters, along with its passengers. Ryan had encountered one or two in his day.

  “Why aren’t they shooting it at us, if that’s what it is?” Krysty asked, shading her eyes with her hand to look at the enemy yacht.

  “Just wasting ammo,” J.B. said. “Moving target, shooting from a moving platform, both moving all kinds of ways at once. Plus it lobs shells on a real slow, looping trajectory.” He shook his head. “Naval gunnery like that takes a lot of practice even with straight-shooting cannons.”

  “Well, they are pirates,” Krysty said.

  “However many shells they got for that thing,” Ryan said, “they don’t have enough to practice those kinds of shots.”

  “Well,” she said with a smile and shrug, “maybe our friend back there’s unwilling to risk damaging his stolen property.”

  Ryan lowered the longeyes and exchanged a glance with J.B. “Don’t reckon old Silver-Eye back there would hesitate a second to set this boat afire with his own grubby hands, long as he thought there was at least a fifty-fifty shot we’d burn with it.”

  “Where’s Mildred?” Ryan asked.

  “Down with the engine,” Krysty said. “Of course. She treats it like her baby.”

  J.B. grunted, although he smiled ruefully. He was certainly a better engine mechanic than the physician, although she was a pretty fair tinkerer. But somehow it’d become important to her to take the Wailer’s diesel under her wing. Ryan couldn’t see as it made much never mind either way. The engine was running smoothly enough, and if it crapped on them they weren’t likely to have time to take it apart and fix it anyway.

  A painfully loud honking blared from the cabin behind them. It was the yacht’s horn, which had given the alarm last night—too late to do its skeleton crew any good. Ryan turned, annoyed with himself for being startled by the noise, and saw Doc leaning out the cabin waving excitedly toward them.

  “What is it?” he called.

  “Come see for yourself, my dear Ryan!” Doc called, and ducked back inside to take the wheel again.

  Ryan looked at his companions. They shrugged in unison and walked briskly forward.

  Even before they cleared the low cabin, Ryan could see they had come around a big steep headland of volcanic rock so densely overgrown it showed only flashes of black rock and soil. If the pirate maps were right, the ville of Nuestra Señora should be in plain sight now.

  It was. Ryan stopped dead, a pace in front of the cabin.

  Nuestra Señora was a decent-sized settlement, if nothing compared to NuTuga. It boasted at least a hundred buildings, from structures with solid-looking whitewashed walls to mere huts with palm-thatch roofs and flexible screens for sides that would be rolled up when the weather was fair. It was a common construction style on the Gulf or West Indies coasts, where stone or concrete or even brick weren’t always accessible, and a hurricane was going to blow down anything less stoutly constructed once or twice a year, anyway.

  But it was hard to tell many details about the ville, because much of it was on fire.

  “Eyes skinned,” Ryan rapped.

  He saw more smoke than actual flame, suggesting the blaze had burned for some time.

  “Whoever did this could still be hanging around.”

  “So much,” Doc intoned from inside the cabin, “for the good citizens of Nuestra Señora aiding us in standing off the cutthroats.”

  “In other news,” J.B. said from right behind, “the Wasps are unwrapping that weapon on their foredeck.”

  Ryan glanced back. He considered unslinging his Steyr Scout to try to discourage Silver-Eye and his people from using whatever horror it was they were unlimbering.

  But range, wind and relative motion would have made it a waste to take the shot. He wasn’t that good. Nobody was that good.

  A good bullet-sprayer lik
e the Wailer’s pintle-mounted .30-caliber machine gun would’ve worked just fine. Spilled blood won’t go back in the body, Ryan reminded himself with a quick frown, no matter how hard you push.

  He ducked into the cabin. “I’m taking the wheel, Doc,” he said.

  Doc stepped nimbly aside.

  Ryan steered toward the Nuestra Señora docks. They at least looked intact. It would take real effort and probably a fair amount of gasoline to torch the waterlogged planks. A few small craft, hung with nets, bobbed at anchor in the little bay. Their paint was faded and flaked away, but they showed signs of being kept in the best repair that ville people with few resources could manage.

  The vessel shuddered as he drove the throttle forward. The engine needle shot past the redline and pinned. He heard as well as felt the diesel begin to knock precariously.

  A moment later, Mildred rushed into the cabin from belowdecks, her eyes wild and cheek smudged with grease.

  “Ryan, what’s going on?” she demanded. “Are you trying to blow up my engine?”

  “If you’ll take a look around, Mildred,” Ryan said mildly, “you’ll note it isn’t rightly your engine, or even our engine. It’s their engine.”

  He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. From the corner of his eye, he caught her goggling at the nearness of the pursuing boat and the flurrying activity on the foredeck. Not to mention what they’d more than likely uncovered by now.

  “J.B.,” he called out, dodging them behind a battered boat with high-raked bow and stern almost like an Asian junk. “Stop your skylarking and get below. You’ve got preparations to make.”

  “Got you.”

  He could almost hear the grin in the armorer’s words.

  “Ryan,” Mildred said, “we are about to dock at a ville which is on fire.”

  “Hard as you might find it to believe, Mildred,” he said, “I noticed that.”