“Stacey,” Millie said to his mother, “you’re raising a real gentleman here, but I think he needs to lighten up a little sometimes.”
“Denise is our jokester,” Stacey replied. “Glen has a sense of humor, but he’s mostly serious.”
“At the moment,” he interjected, “and usually for good reason.” He removed the binoculars from his eyes and handed them to his mother. “Here, take a look.”
Stacey trained the glasses on the location Glen pointed out. After studying the spot for a full thirty seconds, she lowered the glasses and asked her son, “What do you make of it?”
“It’s big, but it doesn’t look military,” he responded. “I thought it looked like a cargo ship, probably one of those container ships.” He took the binoculars back and studied it a little more. “It’s riding high, so it’s empty.” He watched it for several minutes. “It looks like it’s moving pretty fast for a big ship. It’s closer than it should be.”
“My fault,” Stacey lamented. “We would have seen it sooner if I’d set up watches.”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference,” Millie consoled her. “If we’d seen it an hour ago, how far could we have run? And where to?”
“How long before it gets here, do you think?” Stacey asked Glen.
“Hard to tell. I would guess about two hours. For all I know, though, it might pass by five miles away from us.”
“Your best guess?”
“I think it’s going to come a lot closer than five miles.”
“We’ll keep our eye on it and when it gets close, I’ll get the engine going, for all the good that will do us.”
Glen went forward and positioned himself near the bow. He kept the binoculars trained on the ship. An hour later, he went back to the cockpit. “It’s a container ship, all right,” he told the women, “but there’s something strange about it. It’s kinda like it’s – armed.”
“Armed?” the women said in unison.
“Yeah, but not like a military ship. It has some military tanks and a helicopter on the deck. It has some other stuff, too. Smaller stuff. I can’t be sure, but it looks like rocket launchers or something.”
Stacey took the binoculars and looked at the ship, then handed the glasses to Millie.
Millie whistled. “Say, these binocs are pretty powerful. I can actually see stuff in detail. Those are tanks, all right. Everything else you said, too.”
“Do you see any people?” Stacey asked.
“Everything is really small at this distance, but some things are moving around on the deck.”
“Is it possible they’re military?” Stacey wondered. “Maybe some army people needed to move some weapons to another location and there was no military transportation available.”
“Hold that thought,” said Millie.
Forty-five minutes later, there was little reason to hold the thought any longer. Unless military uniforms now consisted of dirty jeans, torn tee-shirts and arm-length tattoos, the people aboard the container ship did not represent any government authority. They did have a bevy of armaments aboard, however. Visible were three tanks, a helicopter, twenty missile launchers and even some old bazookas. Who knew what might be below in the cargo holds.
“What could they want from us?” Stacey wondered. “We can’t possibly have anything that would benefit them.”
“People like that don’t reason things out,” said Millie. “It’s why they never have much and are always on the prowl.”
The big ship’s course was not directly at the sailboat. Stacey had the engine running and was prepared to try evasion tactics, but as the container ship approached, it was over a mile-and-a-half further out to sea than the La Sirena. It began to slow down, causing the three aboard the sailboat to grab their weapons. The ship was well distant, but they nonetheless eyed it suspiciously.
The container vessel never came to a complete stop. It was close to being at a standstill when it was as close as it would ever be to them, but then its engines revved up and it moved ahead again.
“What was that all about?” Millie asked, not expecting an answer.
She got one. “That,” said Glen, pointing toward the stern of the container ship.
The big ship had lowered a forty-foot launch on its seaward side, out of sight of those on the sailboat. When the mother ship had passed, the launch moved directly toward the La Sirena, leaving a trail of swirling water in its wake.
With the binoculars, Glen could see that there were six determined looking men aboard. Four had automatic weapons at the ready. One of the others had a bazooka on his shoulder, pointing it in their direction. The launch got closer and, even without the binoculars, they could all see that the sixth had a shell ready to shove into the bazooka’s tube.
Chapter 43
ZACH started shooting while he was still thirty yards away from the men behind the overturned car. His bullets sprayed the area, and one hit a man in the arm. He fell to the ground and grabbed his arm, trying to stop the bleeding. The other man shuffled around to the front of the car to get out of the line of fire.
George, who was in the front passenger seat, slid behind the wheel, drove the Mercedes up to the overturned car, and stopped in the middle of the street. Ron and Denise jumped out as he braked.
A shot from the house hit the lower right leg of the man who tried to escape by going to the front of the car. “Stop shooting, I give up!” he cried. He tossed his rifle into the middle of the street, threw his hands in the air, and stumbled over beside his partner. “I give up! I ain’t got no weapon no more!”
Zach grabbed the second guy, raised him up, and made him stand against the overturned car, his back up against the rusted frame. The man was still trying to stop the bleeding, but Zach, who had seen a lot worse, was paying no attention to the wound. He had his AK-47 pointed at the man. Denise and Ron came around to cover the other man, who was leaning on the car frame for support.
“What the devil are you two trying to do?” Zach barked.
“Them people got food in that house!” the man with the leg wound growled. “We need it.”
“And you’d kill them to get it?”
“We told them to give it to us, but they wouldn’t.”
“Zach, is that you out there?” came a voice from the house.
“Yeah, Dad, it's me. If it’s okay, we’re coming in. We have a couple of wounded prisoners.”
“They’re lucky they’re not dead!” his father called back.
Zach looked sternly at the man with the leg wound. “He’s right, you know. He could just as easily have put that bullet right between your eyes. C’mon, we’re going over to the house. They’ll have something to clean and bandage your wounds in there.”
“That old geezer’ll kill us if we go there.”
“If he wanted to kill you, you’d be dead! Let’s go.”
He pushed the two men ahead and was joined by Denise and Ron, their rifles pointed at the men.
“George called out from the car, “I’ll stay here and keep an eye out in case they have friends.”
“That’s a good idea,” Zach agreed. “Thanks, George.”
With one man limping badly and the other trying to nurse his arm wound, they marched up to the front door. A man in his late sixties opened the door and let them in. He leaned his rifle against a wall and hugged Denise. “My, my, look at you!” He sized her up. “I bet you’re as tall as your mother already.”
“Still two inches shorter, but I grow that much in a year.”
“It’s good seeing you, too, Dad,” Zach interjected. “But we have a couple of wounded prisoners here. Where’s Mom?”
“She's guarding the back. Sometimes one or two of these yokels try to come at us via the open field back there. I’ll go get her.”
“Ron, do you mind going with him so you can watch the back while she tends to these two?”
“Be glad to,” Ron said, following Zach’s father through the living room and onto the back patio.
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A minute later, Zach’s father came back with his wife. She was carrying a 12-guage shotgun but set it aside so she could give Zach and Denise big hugs.
“Hey,” the man with the wound in the leg groused, “I’m wounded over here.”
She folded her arms and stared at him. “If it had been me, Bob, you’d be dead, not wounded.”
“You know these guys, Mom?”
“We gave them some food and told them where they could get more,” his mother said. “But they decided it would be easier to come and steal it from us. Stupid mistake.”
“Hey, the food you told us about is more than a hundred miles away and still in the ground. I ain’t no stoop laborer.”
“You’ll learn to be if you want to eat,” said Zach’s father.
His mother went out into the garage and came back with first aid medications and bandages. She cleaned and bandaged the wounds while the senior Arthur turned to his son. “We heard there are some crops in a few isolated places in this valley and more in the central valley. They’re drying up, so we were going to go get some before these goofballs came by and distracted us. We have enough to last awhile, but we could always use more.”
“Dad, you need more than food. You have to think about finding another location.”
“We’ve already decided that. We have the SUV packed with all our food, water, and other supplies. That’s why your mother had to go out there for the bandages. What we were going to pick up in the fields would have been given us fresh food until we were on our way to where we were going. We heard of a place that some survivalists set up in the mountains. We figured they’d accept us if we brought extra food.”
“Survivalists?” asked Denise, remembering the Coast Guard Captain's warning. “What’s the name of the place?”
“Avalon,” the elder Arthur said.
“Avalon? No, Grandpa! Hooligans are running it. The captain told us.”
“Captain?”
“Just a minute,” Zach interjected. “Did you say mountains? The Avalon Denise is talking about is on Catalina Island.”
“I know the Avalon on Catalina,” the older man said. “Nice place, but not the one I’m talking about. This one is in the high Sierras.”
“That’s a long way away Dad. We heard of another place, and we’re going there from here.”
“Oh?”
They were interrupted by Ron yelling from the back. “We have company. “I’m going to need some help.”
Zach’s mother finished tending to the wounded men, picked up her shotgun, and trained it on the two guys. “You go help that man,” she told the others. “I’ll keep these two covered.”
Before they got to the back porch, the three heard a growing roar.
A motorcycle gang of more than fifty armed thugs was converging on the house through the open field behind it.
Chapter 44
THE boat that was lowered into the water by the container ship was bearing down on the sailboat. Glen watched it nervously. “What are we going to do, Mom? They outnumber us, they have that bazooka thingy, and we can’t outrun them.”
“The first thing we’ll do is find out how good their nerves are,” she responded through clenched teeth. “You two lie down on the deck so you won’t be easy targets. Shoot at anyone on that boat who makes a move.”
“What are you going to do?” Millie asked.
Stacey put the throttle in full ahead and turned the La Sirena directly into the path of the other boat. “I’m going to ram them,” she said, her eyes boring in on the man piloting the other boat.
“Couldn’t have come up with a better plan myself,” said Millie. She sprawled out on the deck and, although she didn’t have a specific target, she got off a few shots with her .357 magnum.
The other boat was still out of range for accuracy, but the bullets sent the men on it scrambling for cover. The one with the bazooka fell to the deck but got back up immediately. The fellow with the shell also jumped up. He still had the shell in his hand, and he prepared to ram it into the bazooka’s tube.
Glen put his AK-47 on automatic and sprayed the area where the bazooka was. He couldn’t tell if the bullets hit anyone but both men and the bazooka hit the deck once again. The shell rolled overboard and sank into the ocean.
By this time, the two boats were fifty yards apart. The sailboat was closing in at full speed. The other boat, which had been heading for the sailboat from the start, didn’t alter its course. It wasn’t at full speed, but half speed was faster than the sailboat’s full speed.
In a few seconds, the distance was reduced to thirty yards. Then, twenty and closing.
Stacey’s fierce gaze never left the eyes of the man piloting the other boat. He tried to look as determined as she was, but the nearer the boats got to one another, the less he was able to control his emotions. At the last second, he panicked and cranked the wheel hard to port to avoid the head-on collision.
The forward hull of the La Sirena scraped the aft part of the powerboat’s hull as it turned away, but neither boat was badly damaged. The sailboat’s bowsprit shot out over the stern of the power boat as it passed, taking part of the aft rail and a man who had tried to hide there, high in the air. The rail hung from the bowsprit as the boats separated but the man was unable to grab on to either boat. He fell into the ocean, never to be seen again.
Stacey turned away and slowed the engine so she and Glen could check the damage. Glen had already run forward and was looking over the side of the bow that hit the powerboat.
“An ugly scrape,” he called back to his mother, “but no holes. The roller furling looks damaged, though.”
The roller furling was what let out the jib sail at the front of the boat, but they had no need for it at the moment, so Stacey could concentrate on what they needed to do to stay alive.
The powerboat came to a halt a hundred yards away, and the men aboard checked for damages to their own boat. As was the case with the sailboat, the damages were mostly superficial. But the men aboard were now angry. Whatever their intent was before, their faces now showed that they would settle for nothing less than sinking the sailboat. Their caution increased to the same degree as their anger, however, so they stood behind the main cabin to focus on their target. Even the man piloting the boat stayed low. Everything but his eyes and the top of his head was hidden.
The nearly invisible pilot turned the boat and moved it slowly in the direction of the sailboat. This time, he didn’t attempt to get in close. When he felt they were close enough to take a shot with the bazooka, he stopped and peered malevolently over the cabin at the people who attempted to ram his boat.
Stacey saw what the men on the powerboat were doing and was worried. They were too far away for her to try to ram them again, and it was obvious they were going to stay just far enough away to avoid a repeat of their first encounter. She looked futilely around, but there simply wasn’t anywhere they could escape to.
She could see the bazooka clearly enough, but the man holding it was mostly hidden by the cabin. His angry face was visible, but it presented too small a target for them to hit with bullets at that distance. Only the tops of their heads and fierce eyes were visible. Except for the man holding the rocket shell. All they could see of him was his hands. The rocket shell itself was all too visible.
In seconds, the shell that would tear a hole in the La Sirena’s hull and sink her and her crew would be on its way. There was nothing they could do to stop it.
Chapter 45
“I WAS too busy at the time to notice, but do you have a vehicle?” Zach’s father asked as they watched the motorcycles bearing down on them. “There’s no way we can fight off that many hoodlums.”
“It’s out front,” said Zach’.
“Good. You have automatic weapons; see if you can slow them down. I’ll get your Mom, and we'll get the SUV out of the garage.” He rushed back into the house.
The motorcycles were within fifty yards of the house, though the field w
as bumpy. Zach could see that two were riding double, and he thought he saw that one of the riders on the back was wearing an eye patch.
“I’ll take the ones on the right,” Ron said.
“Okay, I’ll take out those on the left,” Zach added. “Denise…”
“The center,” she said before he could finish. “I’m going for their tires again.”
“Good idea. The more bikes we can take out of action, the better.
They opened fire. Dirt spewed up in front of the motorcycles and none stopped at first. Soon, though, the front tires of the front bikes burst and they went down. One wobbled to a stop, but the others flipped and crashed. Those behind the leaders began hitting the downed bikes or sliding to a stop off to the side.
“Let’s go,” yelled the elder Arthur from inside the house.
The motorcyclists were in disarray, and none were heading for them at the moment, so the three turned and rushed into the house.
“We’re ready,” said Zach’s mother as the three got to the living room. “Dad’s got the SUV started and the garage door open.” She started for the door leading to the garage.
“Hey, what about us?” one of the wounded men said. The two of them were sitting on the sofa where Zach’s mother had kept them under guard.
“The house is all yours,” she called over her shoulder as she left.
“Huh?” the man said, looking around the living room.
“Enjoy it while you can,” said Zach as he, Ron and Denise darted out the front door.
The SUV, a four-wheel drive Ford, was on the street next to the Mercedes, which George already had running.
“Where to?” called Zach’s mother from within the SUV.
“We need to find a nursery,” replied Zach as he opened the front driver’s side door to the Mercedes. George, realizing that the Arthur men would be likely to know each other’s moves, relinquished the wheel and slid over to the passenger seat. Ron and Denise jumped in the back.
“Nursery? What for?” Mae Arthur wanted to know.
Seeking Safe Harbor: Suddenly Everything Changed (The Seeking Series) Page 16
