Eric Stone and Mark Murphy shot each other a grin and made to carry out Cabrillo’s order. Murphy keyed in the command to one of the .30 caliber machine guns hidden in an oil barrel on deck.

The barrel’s lid hinged open and the weapon emerged in a vertical position before its gimbal it until the barrel was pointed at the earthen embankment behind the dock. On Murphy’s computer, a camera slaved to the M60 gave him a sight picture, including an aiming reticle.

He loosened a volley over the heads of the crowd, the gun barking and a string of empty shell casings falling to the deck in a metal rain. The armed pirates either dropped flat or vanished over the embankment. A few lying prone returned fire, raking the area where the remotely operated gun still smoked. Their 7.62mm rounds were as effective as hitting a rhino with a spitball.

Next to Murphy, Eric Stone dialed up the power from the magnetohydrodynamic engines. The water this deep into the swamp was brackish from having mixed with fresh, but it maintained enough salinity for him to ramp the ship up to eighty percent capacity. He engaged reverse thrust. The power of the massive hydro pumps boiled the water at the Oregon’s bow, and the great ship began to back away from the wooden dock.

The ropes the pirates had used to secure the vessel lost their slack, then went as taut as bowstrings before the old hemp broke. Eric eased the ship back from the dock a good fifty feet and then engaged the dynamic positioning system to keep the Oregon at those exact GPS coordinates.

There was no way he would attempt to maneuver the ship out of the swamp without the Chairman on deck to lend a hand if he got into trouble.

But then his mind was changed for him.

Like a barrage from a group of archers, a flurry of rocket-propelled grenades came sizzling over the embankment. The smoke they trailed seemed to fill the sky from horizon to horizon.

SIX

ERIC SLAMMED HIS FIST ON THE COLLISION ALARM BUTTON. The electronic cry would carry to every deck and compartment on the ship. It was a sound the crew knew well.

At this close range there wasn’t enough time to deploy the 20mm Gatling close-in defense system; however, Mark Murphy was getting it ready for the second salvo he was sure to follow.

A few of the rockets went radically off course, corkscrewing into the water or into the mangroves to detonate harmlessly. Even with the bow facing the attack, the Oregon was still a large enough target to make it difficult to miss. RPGs slammed into her prow, blowing off her fore railing and tearing a fluke off one of her anchors. Others skimmed over the bow and exploded against the superstructure below the closed-off bridge windows.

Had this been any other ship, the onslaught would have turned the vessel into scrap. But the Oregon’s armor held. A few craters had been cored into the steel, and paint had been burned off all over the superstructure, but none of the rocket grenades had penetrated. There remained vulnerable areas, however. The ship wasn’t entirely impervious to a rocket attack. The smokestack shielded the ship’s sophisticated radar dish, and a lucky shot could easily destroy it.

“Incoming,” Juan heard over the radio earbud an instant before the first RPG homed in on his ship.

The blasts at the bow gave him and his team enough warning to clamp their hands over their ears and leave their mouths open to prevent unequal pressure in their sinuses that would blow out their eardrums.

The superstructure rang as though it were a giant bell. Each explosion sent the men reeling back, though they were nowhere near the sections getting pummeled. In those compartments, the staggering concussions were lethal. One pirate, who had been leaning against a wall that took one of the rocket strikes, had his insides jellied by the blast, while the two men with him permanently lost their hearing.

“Tell Eric to get us the hell out of here,” Juan shouted into his microphone. He could barely hear his own voice, while Linda’s was an unintelligible squeal.

As soon as Eric had mashed the collision alarm, he disengaged the GPS and reconfigured the view on the main screen so half of it showed a camera shot over the Oregon’s fantail while the other monitored the pirate lair. There was neither time nor room to turn the five-hundred-foot ship.

He moved the throttles once again into reverse.

The channel looked so narrow he felt like he was going to thread a needle while wearing oven mitts. At least the first mile was straight, so he added more power, backing the big freighter as carefully as he possibly could. It didn’t help that a breeze had picked up, and the hull and superstructure were acting like a sail.

A pair of RPGs was launched from the dock. This time, Mark had the redoubt opened for the six-barreled Gatling gun, and it spooled up to nearly a thousand rpms.

The Vulcan shrieked and the Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades ran into the solid curtain of the 20mm rounds it had spewed. Both warheads detonated over the water, while the embankment beyond was chewed apart by the slugs that overshot. Mark saw that pirates were getting ready to follow the Oregon in their fishing boats. They wouldn’t be an issue once they reached the sea, but until Eric maneuvered them through the mangroves the fishing boats had the edge.

Mark aimed low along the hull of the first boat and unleashed a one-second burst. The shells ripped open the water immediately adjacent to the boat, dousing the rebels and, more important, warning them. They dove off the boat and were halfway down the dock when Murph unleashed the autocannon again.

The small trawler disintegrated in a mushrooming cloud of shredded wood, splintered glass, and torn metal. When the gas tank erupted, the blast knocked the pirates flat, as greasy smoke rose into the air.

The men on the second boat had pulled away from the dock before they realized they were next. Mark almost chuckled at how comically they leapt from the doomed boat, giving little thought to their comrades. When it was clear of men, he fired. The pilothouse was blown away like a garden shed caught in a tornado. So much of the bow was destroyed that, with the throttles open, water poured into the hull until the boat vanished entirely. It reminded him of a submarine sinking beneath the waves, only this craft was never surfacing again.

Up in the superstructure, Juan and his two teammates took up the chase again. Still unable to hear Linda because his ears continued to ring, Cabrillo relied on his hunter’s instincts. They moved slowly and methodically, checking and clearing the area room by room. When they discovered the grisly chamber where one of the rockets had hit, they darted the two deafened pirates. The third man looked like a rag doll with half its stuffing removed.

The explosions, and the fact that they could feel the ship under way, sent the rebels into near panic. They screamed for one another in the blackness, and the ones who found a sealed door clawed at the metal with their bare hands. They had no idea they were being stalked until a dart shot out of nowhere.

Had these men not preyed on unsuspecting ships off the coast, Juan could almost dredge up some pity for them. But he had a mariner’s special loathing for pirates and piracy, so he felt nothing when he fired the final time and sent the last of them into dreamland.

“Okay, Linda, that’s it,” Juan reported. “Unseal the superstructure and get some support in here. Tell Hux to treat the wounded as best she can, but I want this scum off the ship in thirty minutes.”

Cabrillo stripped off the cumbersome night vision goggles when the plates over the exterior doors and ports lifted and the fluorescent lights flickered to life. His wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. It came away soaked, and he knew that the temperature was only partially responsible for the perspiration. His limbs trembled with the aftereffects of the adrenaline high.