Dark Watch

Cabrillo launched himself from his chair, snatching a pair of night vision goggles and a machine pistol from the rack along the aft bulkhead. He was in the elevator before anyone knew he’d moved.

“Lock down the elevator when I reach the bridge,” he called as the hydraulic lift whisked him five stories to the bridge.

Even from high above the deck, the sound of the gun battle was ferocious. The former SEALs were making a good show for themselves, but it was only a matter of time. Cabrillo raced out along the wing bridge, taking a second to peer down. At least twenty pirates had taken defensive positions all around the forward deck and poured blistering fire into the superstructure. He spotted a figure slowly crawling away from the head of the gangway. He had his weapon up and his finger an ounce away from firing when he recognized Eddie’s rain jacket. His gaze swept the pirates again just as one popped up from behind a winch, taking aim at Seng with an AK-47.

Cabrillo swung his weapon and put a bullet through the pirate’s face, adjusted slightly, and dropped another with a double tap to the chest. He ducked behind the solid curtain rail as bullets whizzed by like angry hornets and sparked against the steel. He clicked the selector on the MP-5 to auto, raised it over the railing, and let loose with a long barrage, hosing the deck with fifteen rounds. In the seconds-long pause in counterfire, he got to his feet, flipped the selector back to single, and took aim at the searchlights aboard the trawler.

His heart was beating like a trip-hammer, so the first two rounds missed. He took a steadying breath, let half out, and fired twice more. The pair of lights exploded in a shower of glass, and darkness descended once again.

Almost immediately he heard the staccato bark of the hidden .30 calibers and the pinging rain of spent brass ejected onto the deck. The remote gu

Cabrillo’s machine pistol had a spare magazine taped to the one in the receiver. He changed them over, settled the goggles over his head, and got to work. In the eerie green cast of the night vision device, muzzle flashes looked like fireflies while men appeared like radiant ghosts. He dedicated himself to being Eddie Seng’s guardian angel.

Eddie was still pi

Through the cordite smoke drifting like a dense English fog, Cabrillo identified potential targets and fired with mechanical efficiency. Until the crew gained the upper hand in the battle, he couldn’t worry about taking prisoners.

Blood ran thick across the deck as bodies piled up, but fire from the SEALs had withered to an occasional desultory burst. They’d taken losses. Cabrillo spotted two pirates dashing forward, moving from a hatch cover where they’d hidden to the base of one of the cranes. One pulled something from the knapsack worn by his partner. Juan recognized the satchel charge and cut them down before they had time to arm the device. Another tried to race for the superstructure. As Cabrillo swung to fire, one of the remote machine guns turned on its gimble. The sustained burst cut the man nearly in half.

That seemed to break the back of the pirate horde. The ten or so survivors ran for the gangway just as the big diesel on the Kra bellowed out of idle. They ran into devastating fire from the superstructure. By holding back, Eddie’s men had fooled the pirates into thinking their avenue of escape was clear. Two dropped to the deck, their corpses skidding in their own blood.

The Kra began to pull away, abandoning their boarding party. Cabrillo stitched the trawler’s deck, but there were no targets. The lines securing the gangway to the fishing boat were still secure, so it was slowly torn from its mounts. Two pirates were halfway down it when the Kra began to move. The gangway stretched like a bridge from one ship to the other until the ropes on the Kra parted under the strain. The eighteen-hundred-pound set of stairs twisted, then pulled free from the Oregon, dumping the men into the sea, then crushing them when they surfaced.

The Kra changed angle slightly, narrowing the gap to give their men on the Oregon a chance to jump for it. Eric Stone at the helmsman’s station in the op center recognized the maneuver and turned the Oregon to port and gave her some speed just as the remaining pirates leapt for the rails. One landed on the Kra’s main winch. High above on the wing bridge, Cabrillo heard bones shatter and saw his body tumble to the trawler’s deck. A second gunman smashed into the Kra’s hull, fell into the water, and never resurfaced. The remaining six landed in the narrow space between the two ships.

Juan didn’t know if the helmsman on the fishing boat didn’t see what had happened or just didn’t care. He continued to turn into the Oregon. Eric Stone hit the bow thruster in an attempt to shove the Kra aside, but the prop’s athwartships tu

The two hulls came together in a grinding crash of steel, smearing the men struggling in the water, turning flesh and bone into a pink paste that washed away when the ships separated.

Juan fetched a walkie-talkie from a drawer at the back of the wheelhouse. “Wepps, Cabrillo. As soon as you have a sight picture, hole her at the waterline. Let the sons of bitches know they aren’t going anywhere.”

“Roger,” Mark Murphy replied.

As the distance between the two vessels grew, Cabrillo saw a deckhand aboard the Kra attach the cable from the A-frame derrick to lines already secured to the shipping container sitting aft of the wheelhouse. The chairman squeezed off a few rounds from his H&K, but hitting a target that’s bobbing with the swells from an unstable platform was next to impossible. The man didn’t even look up from his task as bullets ricocheted around him. An unseen winchman cranked up the derrick. Because the A-frame angled out over the trawler’s stern, the large container was dragged across the Kra’s deck, leaving deep scars in the wood planking. The bottom edge caught on a bollard, but the winch drum continued to revolve. The container teetered for a moment before flipping on its side with an echoing clang. When it was finally under the crane, it was hauled into the air and swung free over the transom. The winchman released the brake, and the container smashed into the sea, bobbed for a moment, then began to fill with water.

Cable stripped away from the freewheeling winch drum as the Kra continued to increase the distance. Whatever contraband the trawler was carrying was doubtlessly in the container, and Cabrillo felt if they were quick enough, they could disable the fishing boat and tie on to the unspooling line before it vanished forever.

As if reading his thoughts, Mark Murphy loosened a one-second burst from the Gatling gun hidden in the Oregon’s bow. Fifty depleted uranium slugs punched into the Kra at the waterline just fore of the pilothouse at a spot Murph assumed was clear of hitting her fuel tanks.

The tanks were well aft of the gaping hole, but the rounds impacted the pirates’ weapons cache. The first explosion was relatively small and contained. Only a lashing tongue of fire belched from the gash cut into the hull by the Gatling. The second blast punched through to the deck and blew out an eight-by-eight section of hull. Fire and smoke rolled from the trawler as she heeled over like she’d just fired a broadside of ca