Rogue Elements

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Bolan nodded. “Anything else of note?”

“Two container units of Indian Amrut Brandy, bound for ports of call the Prophet Mohammed would not approve of, and, might I add, if this all some sad plot to finagle a grog ration, I will—”

“I’ll need two cases of the Amrut, actually just the bottles, and four or five cans of kerosene.” Bolan quirked an eyebrow for what was becoming his munition of choice on the Arabian Peninsula. “Got any liquid soap?”

Captain Cleverly saw exactly where this was going. “Oh...my...God...”

“Oh, and I need to talk to the engineer.” Bolan saw his plan coming together. “I’ll need ball bearings, biggest he has.”

* * *

Bolan stood in front of a folding table and addressed his team. Morale was about as low as it could get. The Executioner shouted, “At attention!”

Team Viking snapped to attention.

“The enemy will most likely attack us midships, in fast boats, attempting to avoid the water cannons and erect boarding ladders. They will not be easily dissuaded. It is my personal opinion that they intend to take the Caprice, kill everyone on board, including us, and make it disappear. The captain and crew will try to maneuver the water cannons into position, but they will be mostly useless.”

“No fucking shit!” Mendez agreed. “So we’re back to you and Sifu’s liquid soap and souvenir dagger defense? I say we call Hy back and seriously renege on our contracts! If he won’t come, we commandeer the lifeboat and get the hell out of here. Who’s with me?”

Mono, Big Abe and Ketch looked on the verge of agreeing. Sifuentes gave Bolan a guilty look.

Ibarra gave Mendez a Latina-to-Latino head fake and sneer. “Puto.”

He stabbed a defiant finger her way. “Call me anything you want, honey! You go ahead and stay here with your gringo boyfriend! The Somali pirates will probably do things to you he’s afraid to try! Me? I am out!”

Mono and Ketch nodded.

Bolan nodded. “Laz?”

“Yeah?”

Bolan dropped to one knee and hurled a right-hand lead into Mendez’s bladder. He folded as Bolan rose. The Executioner watched with clinical detachment as his teammate writhed, clutched and peed his cargo pants. “That’s pee, Laz. The next time I hit you, you’ll pee blood, and I’ll throw you overboard. The minute you stepped off that chopper you were in. All in. There is no going back. All we have is us, and a job we’ve already been paid for. We have a cargo and crew to protect and a ship to save. So stand up. Stand up for your team.”

Mendez moaned.

“Stand up, or I stand you up. Then I bum-rush you right over the rail. It’s your choice. I don’t give a shit. We’re out of time.”

Mendez got a foot underneath himself and stood. “Screw you.”

“Good.” Bolan nodded in approval. “Anyone else?” He suddenly held up his hands. “Except you, Abe. Not sure I can bum-rush you anywhere, big man.” Big Abe snorted. “No worries, brah. Anyone turns chicken shit on this action, I’ll hold ’em, you hit ’em.” The Samoan lifted his chin toward the blue waters over the bow. “Then I’ll be happy to take out the garbage.”

Despite his extreme physical discomfort, Mendez bravely raised his hand. “Can I ask a question?”

“I welcome questions, Laz.” Bolan nodded. “What’s on your mind?”

“Do you have a plan?”

“We have a strategy.” Bolan turned to Crane Specialist Houston, who set a brandy carton full of bottles on the table. Every soldier who had seen combat kept a spare pair of boots close. Bolan had requisitioned all of them and spent the last hour cutting out the boots’ tongues and weaving the laces. The Executioner took up his backpack and dumped out his handiwork on the table. “Houston.”

Crane Specialist Houston took up an Amrut bottle loaded with kerosene and liquid soap with a bandanna stuffed down the neck.

Big Abe sighed happily. “Molotov cocktail!”

Bolan nodded at Houston. “Light me.”

He put the bottle in the sling and Houston’s Zippo lighter chinked. Bolan pulled the sling taut and gave the burning bottle three good revolutions to give the fire oxygen, then slung it. The flaming bottle pulled a beautiful spiral and slammed into the bow crane ten meters away. Bolan was pretty sure Captain Cleverly was having a fit up in the bridge as the fire clung viscously and crawled up the crane. Team Viking stared in fascination.

Bolan reached into a plastic bucket and took up a one-inch ball bearing he had requisitioned from the ship’s engineer and seated the sphere of high-carbon stainless steel in the sling’s pocket. It had been a while since Bolan had used the maneuver, but he gave it the forward, back and forward Z-shaped windup for dramatic effect and let loose.

The flaming crane boom rang like a bell.

“And that’s how David slew Goliath.”

Big Abe clapped his hands. “Biblical, brah.”

The rest of the team started applauding. The crewmen standing under the bridge started applauding. Bolan nodded at Houston, and the crane specialist ran to the boom with a fire extinguisher. Bolan held up the sling to his team.

“They have to sail right up to us. They have to try to attach a ladder, then they have to climb up it. This is how we defeat them. They aren’t ready.” Bolan turned and held out the sling. “Abe, you’re up.”

Chapter Five (#u11f59329-cc40-5af7-bf13-a805005f1517)

Bolan stood on the bridge wing and took in the Arabian Sea breeze. The stars were just fading. Every member of his team could reliably hit a crane at twenty meters, and he figured that meant they could hit a human at five. Everyone had ten ball bearings half the size of a golf ball in their cargo pockets, and boxes of Molotov cocktails were spaced strategically around the deck with a lighter or matches handy. So were buckets of cooking and machine oil. Houston and three other sailors had volunteered to man the water cannons watch on watch, and the captain was issuing a tot of the opened brandy after each watch to improve morale.

Bolan nodded to himself and drank coffee. The cook on the Caprice was no Namzi, but he’d do. Coffee and hot food were available 24/7. Bolan’s team was spoiling for a fight, the crew was salty and the Caprice was as ready for battle as it was ever going to be.

Bolan just hoped the enemy didn’t have RPGs.

He smelled Ibarra’s perfume just before he heard the click of the ball bearings in her pocket. “Hey, Blue.”

“Hey yourself.” Bolan held out his coffee. Ibarra accepted the mug. She was wearing her sling around her brow like a headband. “No brandy in yours?”

“Nope.”

Ibarra lifted her chin into the breeze and breathed deep with pleasure. “About an hour till sunrise.”

Bolan’s internal clock agreed as he watched the horizon. “Yeah.”

“Wanna go for a quickie in the crane operator’s booth?”

“Yeah.” Bolan shook his head. “But nope.”

“What, we’re still on duty?”

“I’m pretty much on duty 24/7 until we’re in international waters and have guns.”

“What about when we are victorious?”

“Then we’ll celebrate like our pagan ancestors.”

“Which means you’ll be on me like a conquistador on an Aztec princess?”

“Something like that,” Bolan admitted.

“Can’t wait.” Ibarra held out the mug. “Until then I could use more coffee.”

He pushed off the rail. “Yes, ma’am.”

Ibarra seized his hand. “Blue!”

Bolan looked where Ibarra was looking.

“I swear I saw something!”

Yard hadn’t even issued them night-vision equipment. Bolan gazed into the gloom. In the purple light of the predawn he caught whitecaps moving across whitecaps. “Good eye, B.B. Sound the alarm. We’ve got fast boats coming in.”

Ibarra ran into the bridge. Bolan took the gangway down to the main deck a landing at a time. His boots rang on main deck as the captain spoke across the intercom. “All hands! This is not a drill! Action stations!”

Big Abe charged up. “Is this it?”

“This is it.” Bolan put his phone on speaker and slapped its Velcroed back onto his tactical vest. “Captain?”

“Yes, Mr. Blue?”

“Sound and lights.”

Every light on the Caprice clicked on like Christmas. Her harbor searchlights stabbed out into the gloom as the ship’s collision alarm began its whoop, whoop, whoop! The deck hummed beneath Bolan’s boots as the freighter’s two four-stroke diesels went to full power. Twenty-five knots was just barely under thirty miles per hour, but it would make hooking onto the Caprice much harder.

Mendez shouted as speedboats pierced the halo of lights surrounding the Caprice. “Here they come!”

AK-47s stuttered into life from the approaching boats almost as if they had heard him. Captain Cleverly shouted across the open phone line they were using as a com-link. “It’s the bloody Spanish armada...”

Bolan watched the pirates come in. Cleverly was right. There were too many of them. Even if they had a mother ship, three or four skiffs were the most that were carried, and they usually fanned out to form a wide net across a shipping lane. This group had launched from a land base, and someone had told them when and where to intercept the Caprice. Bolan counted half a dozen. Orange fire strobed from the prows of the pirate skiffs, and bullets rattled like hail off the hull and sparked and whined off the superstructure. Bolan and his team dropped low. Bullets hit the bridge and shattered windows.

Captain Cleverly swore a blue streak. “Fast boats coming alongside to starboard! Right in front of you, Blue!”

The ladder hooks clanked onto the rail and bullets streaked over it. Someone was providing effective covering fire. The hooks rattled and shifted as the ladder took the weight of boarders. “Abe!” Bolan loaded his sling with a Molotov. “You’re up!”

Big Abe came forward with his huge frame hunched over a sixteen-quart stockpot filled with liquid soap. “Better if this shit was boiling, brah!”

“Let them have it!”

The Samoan upended the pot between the ladder hooks. Men who were ascending screamed and scrabbled as the wet metal rungs of the ladder suddenly went bubble-bath slick. The pot tore from Big Abe’s hands as a burst of AK fire drilled through it. Abe crouched, shaking out his hands and counting his fingers. “Shit!”

Bolan lit his firebomb and rose. He swung the sling overhead like a tennis serve and released straight down. Men in the skiff below screamed as the flaming bottle shattered and fire engulfed the prow. The Executioner dropped just as bullets screamed past his head. “Abe! Ladder is clear!”

Abe heaved on the hooks, pulled the ladder free and chest-pressed it into the sea.

The captain shouted across the link. “Skiff to aft! Amidships!”

Another ladder clanked. Ketch and Ibarra ran in a crouch below the level of the rail. A man with an AK hit the top of the ladder, spraying gunfire. Mono rose with his sling taut. “Got you!” The sling whirled, and the ball bearing smashed the boarder in the sternum. The pirate flapped his arms like a dying gull and toppled back. A high-powered rifle cracked out on the water, and Mono spun and fell.

Ibarra screamed. “Mono!”

“Sniper!” Bolan roared. “Stay low! Laz! See to Mono!”

Another pirate hit the top of the ladder. Ibarra cut loose with her sling. The invader bobbled-headed as Ibarra’s missile cracked into his skull. The pirate fell back with a chrome-colored third eye weeping blood from the middle of his forehead. Ketch slid across the deck as if he were headed for home plate, clutching a slopping five-gallon bucket of soap. A screaming pirate appeared at the top of the rail. Ketch slammed the plastic bucket over the invader’s head like a medieval helmet and rammed his fist in a wicked right-hand lead where the visor would have been.

The pirate toppled backward. Ketch had the wherewithal to snatch the AK from the man’s soapy hands. The high-power rifle cracked again. The bullet hit below the bridge’s window frame. Sparks flew as a bridge control panel shattered.

“Ketch! The sniper!” Bolan shouted. “The sniper!”

Ketch popped up. The big rifle out in the dark cracked again, but it was seeking to damage the bridge and bridge personnel. The AK chattered as Ketch fired at the sniper’s muzzle-flash. He ducked as several AKs answered.

Captain Cleverly snarled. “Skiffs alongside! Port and starboard!”

Ladders hit the Caprice.

“Grenade!” Ibarra yelled.

The bomb looped over the rail and fell at Bolan’s feet. He snagged it and lobbed the explosive to the opposite rail. “Down!”

Bolan’s team grabbed the deck. A screaming pirate came over the rail. His war cry rose to a shriek as he saw the grenade spinning on the deck before him. The bomb detonated, and he shuddered as if he were in a terrible wind and fell back. Bolan loaded his sling with a Molotov cocktail and lit its fuse. The grenadier pirate came over the other rail, holding a grenade in his hand.

Bolan let fly.

The spiraling bottle just missed, but it hit the top of the rail and shattered. Half of the bottle’s contents sheeted over the pirate and ignited. He pulled a flaming crucifix from around his neck and dropped back. His grenade clanked to the deck.

He hadn’t pulled the pin yet.

Bolan ran forward at a crouch and snatched the bomb out of the path of the creeping, flaming oil and shoved it in his pocket. He took his last Molotov and lit it, not bothering to use the sling. He stood. Below, the burning pirate was flailing and screaming, and his fellow pirates in the boat were flailing and screaming, trying to avoid him. Bolan flung his firebomb into the middle of the ruckus. It broke apart, and fire flooded the skiff. The pirates abandoned the vessel en masse.