“God help us,” someone said.

“They’re gonna try to hit us in the same spot to break our double hull,” the first officer said.

Eichenbrenner spoke into his walkie-talkie. “Bridge. Captain. Where’s our air cover from the US Navy?”

A squeak from the walkie-talkie. “Captain, we raised the Ingraham. Two choppers on the way!”

The engines of the first boat revved. It planed up and began plowing through the water, its bow aimed straight at the Altair Voyager.

The sound of more thunder. The second boat revved its engines. Its bow shot up as it charged like a bull in the wake of the first. The third fell into the fast-moving line. Then the fourth. And the fifth.

Like a bright lightning bolt flashing in the sun, the kamikaze flotilla cut the water in a vertical column, one behind the other, engines roaring, bearing down on the starboard gunwale just behind the bow.

“Open fire!” Eichenbrenner yelled.

The sharp crack of rifle volleys echoed across the steel superstructure of the ship. The smell of burnt gun powder filled the air.

An orange fireball burst from the fuel tank of the lead boat, followed by black smoke. Cheering erupted.

The burning hulk veered to the right as the second boat charged through its wake.

“Fire again!”

Shots splashed around the hull, spraying seawater in the air. Its windshield exploded in a shower of glass. Blood gushed from one of the terrorists’ heads. The pilot ducked down under the dash. The second boat, now the lead, charged on.

“Keep firing!”

Thirty yards.

Twenty yards.

“Keep firing.”

Ten yards.

“Shoot the gas tank!”

Bang…bang…bang…bang…

Five yards.

BOOM!

The speedboat crashed into the side of the ship’s hull at full speed. The explosion rocked the Altair Voyager, knocking men off their feet. Flames lapped up the right side. Captain Eichenbrenner stumbled against the steel protective cable surrounding the ship’s perimeter.

BOOM!

The third speedboat had now made it through the token rifle fire and crashed into the ship. Another explosion.

Eichenbrenner grasped the cable and looked up in time to see two of his men falling into the sea.

“Man overboard!” Eichenbrenner screamed into his walkie-talkie. “Execute man overboard drill! All engines stop!”

BOOM! BOOM! Two more heavy blows to the hull. More men splashed into the water.

“Everybody move aft!” Eichenbrenner motioned his men away from the leaping flames. The ship’s engines threw the propellors into reverse. The sudden halting of the ship’s forward movement knocked a few more men off their feet, but fortunately, this time no one flew off the deck.

“Toss life rings to those men!”

Five white life rings spun like Frisbees over the water, spinning, spinning, and finally splashing down into the Andaman Sea.

“Bridge!” Eichenbrenner yelled into the walkie-talkie. “Get a fire team down on those flames. Throw everything you’ve got at it. All fire extinguishers. All the water hoses on the ship. Get that fire out fast or it’s all over.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Blocking the sun with his hand, Eichenbrenner looked down over the side of his ship, squinting to see if the life rings had reached his sailors, flailing in the water below.

The rings bobbed on the water in a straight line over perhaps seventy-five yards. One man reached a ring in the center of the line. Two others were swimming toward the rings floating over to the right. The last two sailors were nowhere to be seen.

Fire shot skyward from the upper right gunwales of his ship, producing a rising heat that made it impossible to stand pat and search.

Eichenbrenner turned and sprinted toward the stern, away from the leaping flames.

US Navy SH-60B Seahawk (“Rover 1”)

Near the Malacca Strait

2:15 p.m.

At five hundred feet above the water, Lieutenant David Carraway surveyed the seascape below. The chopper’s shadow rushed across the sunlit waters, as the tropical green of the Malaccan Strait gave way to the blue waters of the Andaman Sea.

His sister chopper, code name Rover 2, the other Seahawk from the USS Ingraham, flew two hundred yards off to his side, tracking a parallel northwesterly course at one hundred thirty knots. Carraway gave a thumbs-up to Rover 2, then switched his radio frequency for a direct link with the other chopper.

“Rover 2, Rover 1. I’ve got you off my left wing, over.”

“Roger that, Rover 1,” said Lieutenant J. G. Edison Towe, Rover 2’s pilot. “You’re in my sights too, sir.” Towe flashed a thumbs-up back at Carraway.

“Very well,” Carraway said. “Maintain course and speed. ETA to targets five minutes.”

Static burst over the emergency frequency.

“Mayday! Mayday! This is the tanker Altair Voyager. Be advised we are on fire and are taking on water! Mayday! Mayday! This is the Altair Voyager. We are on fire and listing! Coordinates at zero-niner-four degrees, thirty minutes, fifteen seconds east longitude; zero-six degrees, twenty-five minutes, ten seconds north longitude. Mayday! Mayday!”

Carraway looked at his copilot. “Give me the mike.”

“Aye, Skipper.”

“Altair Voyager. This is US Navy helicopter. We copy your mayday. ETA less than four.”

“Roger that, navy chopper. Please hurry. They’ve busted our hull! We’ve got crude leaking. The sea’s on fire! We’re taking on water fast!”

Carraway clicked the send button again. “Roger that, Altair Voyager. Are you still under attack?”

Static. Then a response. “That’s a negative. No longer under attack. Preparing to abandon ship! The sea to the starboard of the ship is on fire, and we’ll be abandoning ship to the port side. We’re tossing life rafts into the water now.”

“Copy that, Altair Voyager. Hang tight. We’ll be right there.”

The White House

3:20 a.m.

Mack Williams, the president of the United States, was not in the best of moods.

In the last year of his second administration, Mack faced a lameduck Congress full of howling Democrats who wanted to crow about everything from legalizing homosexual marriage to unconditional amnesty for every illegal alien to socialized medicine for all. Add to that the constant series of international crises rooted in the global problem of radical Islam, and Mack was feeling the heavy weight of office upon his shoulders.

Like his predecessors, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, his hair had morphed from mainly brown, to salt-and-pepper, and finally, by this last year of his administration, to mostly salt. His forehead, as smooth as a baby’s bottom when he had raised his hand and taken the oath of office that cold January morning on the West Front of the US Capitol, had grown crisscrossed with lines, carved by the burden of his position.

The international crises and foreign threats had carved the deepest grooves.

His presidency had seen radical Islam attempt to infiltrate the US military, an attack on the Dome of the Rock in Israel, a daring military operation which he had ordered into Mongolia’s Gobi Desert to rescue an American naval officer, and a secret naval operation into the Black Sea to attack a Russian freighter suspected of transporting stolen nuclear fuel.

More than once, his administration had found America on the brink of nuclear war. The responsibility was astronomical. As a devout Christian, Mack had gotten through much of it by quoting the verse in Philippians that told him to be “anxious about nothing, but in all things bring your petitions and requests to God…and the peace of God that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

He needed God’s supernatural peace. Otherwise, the pressure of the job, especially in these trying times of being at war with radical Islam, could kill a man.