A few moments later, the superstructure was crawling with personnel to deal with the unconscious gunmen. Giuseppe appeared at Juan’s side and handed him a water bottle glistening with dew. He walked with Juan as the Chairman headed for the op center. The Italian had to lengthen his stride to keep pace.
“I was thinking,
The only saving grace was that the ship’s ballast tanks were full to make her look heavily laden, so only one of her secret decks was exposed. One round penetrated the executive boardroom and blew through a pair of leather-backed chairs before embedding itself in the far wall. Another entered the pantry and tore apart a pallet of flour so the air became a solid-white curtain of dust. A third exploded into the cabin of an off-duty engineer. He’d been sitting at his desk, watching the battle on the ship’s closed-circuit television system, which saved his legs from the blast of shrapnel, but his back and neck were shredded as though he’d been mauled.
This all happened in the blink of an eye. Mark watched helplessly. He was impotent until the computer told him the second gun was ready.
“Wepps, what the hell?” Juan growled without taking his attention off the delicate maneuver of turning the big ship.
“One more sec . . .”
Murphy’s board turned green, and he unleashed the weapon. The jungle where the technical lay hidden was swept away by the onslaught. Trees up to a foot thick were mowed down like wheat before a combine. One trunk plummeted to the earth, a halo of wood chips choking the area. It smashed into the technical’s bed, silencing its twin cannons, but Mark kept up the remorseless torrent of rounds until the trees were gone and all that remained of the truck and crew was a smoldering ruin of torn metal and rended flesh.
The
Eric gave Cabrillo a look of respect bordering on hero worship. He never would have dared maneuver the ship so fast through such a tight channel.
“Think you can take it from here?” the Chairman asked his helmsman.
“I got her, boss man.” The ship automatically recorded its position using the constellation of GPS satellites. All Stone had to do now that the trickiest corner had been negotiated was run a reverse course through the nava-computer and the ship would steer herself around the tricky swamps and shifting shoals. He already had the coordinates where the derelict fishing boat awaiting Mohammad Didi had been pre-positioned.
Juan got up from his command chair and turned to Giuseppe Farina. “Let’s figure out who you want to keep and who’s going over the side. I want the pirates off the ship before we clear the mangroves.”
He led the Italian observer down several decks to the
The crew had already inflated a large black raft, and the unconscious forms of the pirates had been loosely bound to it. Once they awoke, they would be able to free one another and paddle the raft back to shore. Hux still had the wounded in the medical bay, while the dead would be given burials at sea.
“We’ll take this one and this one and that guy on the far side,” Farina said, pointing to Malik and Aziz. “When they took the ship, they appeared to have some leadership role. Who knows, they might prove to be an intelligence asset.”
“The younger one probably isn’t worth it. Guy smokes more dope than a hippie at a Grateful Dead concert.”