enough and liked it, never really care
for anything else thereafter.
-Ernest Hemingway, 'On the Blue Water'
D-108, Londonderry Port, UK
It was already dark when the boat finally entered Lough Foyle, in the only place where the South, the Republic of Ireland, was north, and the north, the Six Counties, was south.
Biggus Dickus appreciated the darkness. It's just as well, he thought. Even a disarmed and civilian painted ELCO eighty-one foot patrol torpedo boat is inherently suspicious. If it hadn't been so fast and so cheap, I'd probably have turned it down.
'Biggus Dickus' had booked a berth for the Bastard at one of the marinas dotting the sides of Lough Foyle. This did not prevent the boat from taking a slow spin around the Lough, through darkened gray-brown waters that were almost without any natural waves.
'There she is,' said Eeyore, pointing leftward with his chin. Eeyore laughed softly.
'I see her,' agreed Biggus standing at the wheel of the boat. 'And what's so funny?'
'I looked it up. George Galloway is a Brit politician. He's probably an atheist, himself, but he latched onto the Islamics there to launch and support his political career. He even married one of them, a really hot Palestinian girl, though I think she divorced him. He is, in any case, a defensive mouthpiece for Islamic terrorism and an offensive, in both senses, speaker for the gradual subordination of Great Britain to Islam. No wonder they named a boat after him. And naming a boat after him suggests very strongly that that is no innocent ship.'
'I always presumed that,' Biggus said. 'Simmons?'
'Here, Chief,' answered the former boatswain standing by what once would have been a mount for a .50 caliber machine gun . . . and would soon be again.
'When we berth, you and Morales go ashore. Get a rental and scout out that ship.'
'Wilco, Chief.'
'And remember to drive on the wrong side of the road.'
'Forty-one . . . forty-two . . . forty-three . . . forty-four,' Simmons counted aloud as the last group boarded the Galloway. 'Your count agree with that, Morales?'
The Puerto Rican former SEAL nodded, then added, 'There's no way that ship needs a crew that size. That's twice as many as they need, maybe more.'
'Which smells like trouble even if they're perfectly innocent,' Simmons agreed. 'But where else have you seen young men who looked just like that lot?'
Morales laughed. 'Well, besides Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan . . .'
'Exactly. Those aren't sailors and they aren't mostly illegal immigrants. Those are fighters. We need to bring this back to the chief. But first some measurements. I make it as twelve feet from waterline to top of the hull near the bow.'
'A little less,' Morales corrected. 'No more than ten and a half.'
'Nah; it's twelve. Look at the containers. In any case, we can two-man-lift a boarder over it. She carries, max, seven hundred TEU.'
'Agreed.'
Simmons did some mental gymnastics. 'I make her as roughly four hundred feet in length and maybe sixty- five in beam.'
'About right,' Morales said. 'She's Antigua registered. Any issues with that?'
Simmons shrugged. 'None I can think of. Maybe Oprah Winfrey or Eric Clapton would object to our taking it. But fuck them.'
'Not Oprah,' Morales said. 'I think she's supposed to become Secretary of Cloying Sweetness under the current administration.'
'Sweet,' said Biggus, though his tone of voice didn't suggest he found anything too sweet in the news. 'I'd thought to get two of us aboard, then wait for the Galloway to get out into the sea lanes. Those two could have taken the radio room and bridge, then the rest of us would have intercepted and boarded. With forty-four men aboard, half of them with no likely jobs, the odds of even one man being found are just too good.'
'Simple boarding and seizure at sea, then, Chief?' asked Simmons. He looked around the inside of the Bastard at the mounds of carefully netted and tied down gear provided by the shipping container in Paldiski. 'It isn't like we lack for materiel.' Simmons held up a radio-controlled detonator, by way of illustration.
Thornton shook his head. 'I don't know there'll be anything simple about it. And it'll be tough to do without them getting the word out. Though you're right about the materiel.'
'They'll be leaving soon, Chief,' Simmons said. 'Otherwise they wouldn't have brought the extra people aboard yet.'
'I still don't think we can hide two men aboard with all those extra fuckers roaming the ship out of boredom.'
'If not two, Chief, how about one?' suggested Antoniewicz. 'I'm a little dude; I can find a place to hide if you can get me aboard.'
Biggus shook his head doubtfully. 'Bad form to send a lone man off,' he said.
Eeyore stood to his full five feet, four inches, held his arms out invitingly, and answered, 'Hell, Chief, I'm not even a full lone man. So if we can't send two, let's send three quarters or a half. Bound to confuse ‘em.'
***
The Russian rubber boat made not a sound as its electric motor forced it through the watery gloom. It passed by Galloway's stern, then drove in under the pier. Once under cover, it weaved between the wooden pilings to the bow. There, it passed under the steel wedge and came around the bow to its port side. The boat came to a stop as it bumped up, still soundless, against the hull. The man at the tiller, Bland, dialed down the power to just enough to keep the rubber tight against the target.
Forward in the rubber boat, Simmons was at the bow, followed by Morales, followed by Antoniewicz. All four men in the boat wore Russian night vision goggles strapped to their heads. These were not the best, perhaps, but they were good enough for this. Without a word all three forward stood low and shuffled to the rubber boat's rounded bow. Antoniewicz leaned forward and put both gloved palms against the hull. Simmons and Morales locked arms and bent low to allow the boarder to get one foot up. They then stood, rocking the rubber boat and almost causing Antoniewicz to lose his balance. He pinwheeled his arms a bit, moving his center of mass forward to balance again against the hull.
Eeyore felt his heart beating fast and hard as his balaclava covered head peeped over the side of the ship. There was a container marked 'Cosco' just in front of him. He could see the letters clearly enough even in the grainy image of his NVGs.
He felt Morales' hand shift to take a position under his right foot. Simmons did so a moment later with the left. Eeyore's upward motion continued until he was nearly waist high to the top of the hull. His hands, gripping that top, moved downward relative to his torso. A push, the swing of a leg, and the boarder was over the top and easing his feet down to the deck below. It was a tight fit between hull and containers. He waited a moment, listening, then leaned over the side to haul up some ordnance the other two passed to him.
And now to find a place to hide and then scout a bit.
He took from his shoulder holster a Makarov pistol, test and familiarization fired on the voyage from Estonia to Northern Ireland. This pistol had some odd features. It had, for example, an infrared laser aiming device, invisible to the naked eye but quite visible to the Russian-issue NVGs. For another thing, there was a shroud around the barrel. Biggus had said the barrel was drilled to allow gas to escape into the shroud, thus lowering a standard bullet's velocity to something less than the speed of sound. From under his right armpit Antoniewicz removed a cylindrical object, the suppresser, and screwed it to the front of the Makarov. The thing would be silent now, except for the working of the slide. And that, over normal ship and port noise, was nothing.
