turned and slithered out the hatch, to the aft deck, and into the water. From there he swam with easy, effortless strokes to the forward deck and bellied up on it, before swiveling as Eeyore had, to face aft.
In a rehearsed sequence, Antoniewicz lifted the equipment overhead and slightly back to where Morales could grab it and don it. Well after the last piece was gone, after a wait that seemed interminable, but was certainly no more than eight minutes, Morales tapped Eeyore on the shoulder and announced, 'Ready.'
'Go,' said Eeyore, as he eased himself into the water to port and Morales did the same to starboard. Unsurprisingly, the water was quite warm.
Simmons, lying below, felt the boat surge once the weight of the two divers was lifted from it. He swiveled a bezel on his-of course-Rolex, then eased himself back and back some more until he was able to squat under the tower. From there he stood and took a look over the bow at the sea. Already there was no sign of his comrades, which was better than the alternative. Turning around, Simmons took hold of the hatch and, ducking back into Namu, closed and dogged it behind him. He then carefully squatted before resuming his pilot's position.
Moments later, a very odd looking, orca-painted minisub slipped beneath the waves to wait for the prearranged time to rise again.
D-1, MV
'Chin says the boat that was heading toward him and the landing craft never showed. And he can't hear a trace of it on sonar either. Course, the Bastard's sonar is not, shall we say, of the best. Still . . . ' Boxer looked mildly puzzled for only a moment before announcing, 'We intercepted some radio traffic. The other one told him they had a firm fix on us. I think that they're going to try to get together to double team us.'
''Think?' Is that a guess?' Stauer asked.
'An educated guess. Still, yes, I could be wrong.'
Stauer turned his attention to the ship's skipper. 'Recommendations, Ed?'
'Start to take 'em out now, one at a time.'
'That will cost time,' Boxer observed. 'One, we had time for, within the schedule. I don't know about two, though.'
'Yeah,' Kosciusko agreed, 'It'll cost us time. But having one of them show up when we've got seven or eight armored vehicles and a hundred men in the LCM's could cost us the landing and the mission. Then, too, some of what we lose we'll pick up by shaving off the time Chin and the LCM will need to get to us.'
Stauer was nothing if not decisive. 'Fuck it; do it. If we have to burn out the engines racing to the landing site then . . . well . . . that's our employer's problem.'
'Not even his, really,' Boxer said. 'We could always scuttle the ship and let the insurance company worry about it.'
Stauer thought about that for maybe two seconds before agreeing, 'True. What do we owe those assholes, after all?'
'Bring her about,' Kosciusko ordered. A stream of orders followed. 'Spotters forward. Mrs. Liu'-the chief gantry operator- 'to the gantry control. Deck crew hook up an empty container, a forty footer if one's available. Set speed for eighteen knots and I'll buy a case of beer for the engine crew if they can squeeze out twenty.' The constant slight vibration one could feel through the deck suddenly became less slight as the engines below strained to put on maximum speed.
CHAPTER FORTY
Corsairs against corsairs;
there is nothing to win but empty casks.
-Italian Proverb
D-1, Yacht
The pirates had kept the yacht's original name because it just seemed to fit so well, once it had been explained to them.
Times have been better, mused the captain of the yacht and leader of its seventeen man crew. Not that the yacht itself needed seventeen men to run it, of course, but somebody had to man the machine guns, do the boarding, secure the captives, and inventory the haul.
The captain, Nadif, as with almost all of his crew and most of his people, was tall, slender, and fairly light skinned, with features a mix of Arab and African. Gray at the temples, he was just beginning to sprout gray, by single, curly hairs, all over his head. He thought he was probably about forty-five, but couldn't be quite sure. As a young man, he'd been a fisherman, and a good one. It was that, that knowledge of the sea, that had brought him to the pirates who were, by and large, landlubbers or, in any case, young men with very little knowledge of seamanship.
Rather, the knowledge of the sea had made him an asset to the local pirate group, made them seek him out. He'd have had nothing to do with them, ordinarily. But as a fisherman, years before, he'd found he just couldn't compete with the western, Chinese, and Japanese commercial fishers who had taken so much of the local stock that it had become hardly worth the expenditure of gas for the few fish he could catch. Necessity is a harsh mistress, and with a family to support, pirates flashing altogether too much money, that money driving up prices . . . Well, what was I supposed to do?
Victims of our own success, though, Nadif mused. Oh, for a while we were raking it in. And the whites' and squint-eyes' navies were by and large helpless. Yes, they had their successes, as did we. But they never really understood, or would admit to understanding, how to stop us. Until, in the face of their failure, the fat merchant ships simply started avoiding us, avoiding our coastline, at least, unless the cost of fuel was greater than the likely ransom they'd have to pay.
I suppose we were 'overfishing,' too. Nadif patted the console of his little command. Of course we still manage to take the occasional idiot yachtsman.
Fortunately, we never became political, or not too political. I can just imagine what kind of reaction we'd
