Pirate Alley Read online

  Irene winked at Suzanne and asked the waiter for more coffee. Suzanne ordered another Mimosa.

  * * *

  Harry Zopp glanced at the surface radar-and was surprised to see four small targets approaching from the south. They were on a collision course and closing. He picked up the closed circuit telephone, which rang in the captain’s stateroom.

  “Pirates, I think,” Harry Zopp said. “Maybe fifteen minutes out.”

  “Radio the navy and activate the boarding prevention plan,” Captain Arch Penney ordered, then added, “I’ll be right up.”

  Zopp dialed the preset radio frequency into the box in front of him and picked up the handset. “Red Ryder, Red Ryder, this is Sultan of the Seas.”

  “This is Red Ryder. Go ahead, Sultan.”

  “Looks as if we have four high-speed boats approaching from the south on a course to intercept us. About fourteen minutes out. Over.”

  “We’ll get the chopper headed your way. Nearest surface warship is seventy miles northeast of you.”

  Two hours, Harry Zopp thought. He used the intercom to call the bosun. “Activate the boarding prevention plan. Pirates less than fifteen minutes away.”

  Zopp walked out on the starboard wing of the bridge with his binoculars. He was standing there trying to spot the boats on the horizon when Captain Penney joined him.

  “Just got a glimpse of one of them,” Zopp said. “Radar says they are making thirty knots.”

  The captain told the helmsman, “All engines ahead full.” Full speed for the Sultan was thirty-one knots, but with the pirate boats on the starboard quarter, there was no way he was going to outrun them on this heading. He went inside the bridge and looked at the moving map display on the GPS. He was twenty miles offshore. If he turned tail to the pirates, he would be heading toward Yemen. He could buy some time, but he couldn’t sail through sand and stone.

  Penney glanced again at the radar. He could see the symbol for the Stella Maris, fifteen miles ahead. She would pass down his left side if he kept on this course. “Come left ten degrees,” Penney told the helmsman. This course would take him very near to the Stella Maris. He picked up the radio handset and dialed in the proper frequency, then called Stella Maris. Better tell her captain what was going on.

  That was when he got a bad shock. The voice of the Stella Maris’s captain rang in his ears. “Stella Maris is under attack by pirate boats, apparently from Yemen. Three of them. They are shooting up the ship. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”

  * * *

  Lieutenant de vaisseau Gilbert Louceck surveyed the instruments in the cockpit of his Panther helicopter and checked the radar distance readout to the ship currently under attack, eighteen miles from the Yemen coast. In his headset he could hear the captain of the ship calling Mayday in English, and the controller aboard the French destroyer talking to him in French. Long ago he had learned to sort all these voices out. His copilot was answering the controller just now, giving him a range and how many minutes they were from the ship under attack, the Stella Maris. Ten miles to go. A little less than five minutes.

  Now he was listening to the panicky voice of the ship’s radio operator. Apparently the captain was busy conning the ship.

  “They are shooting at the bridge.” The words were in English, although heavily accented. Idly, Louceck wondered about the speaker’s nationality.

  “Now they are approaching again.” While he held the microphone open, Louceck could hear a beating sound that he took to be automatic gunfire. “Three boats. Maybe ten men in each boat.”

  Louceck could see the ship materialize out of the haze, which seemed thicker the higher one got. By now he had the helicopter in a descent, accelerating.

  “About three minutes, capitaine,” the copilot said, quite unnecessarily.

  Automatically Louceck checked his fuel. He had enough to stay over the cruise ship for perhaps twenty minutes, then he would have to fly back to the Toulon, his ship.

  “Call the ship,” he told the copilot. “Get them heading this way.” If the ship could close the distance, that would save a few gallons, give him another minute or two over the cruise ship.

  As the copilot made the call, Louceck turned the safety sleeve on the master armament switch and lifted it, arming the Giat 20 mm cannon carried in the external pod. Just in case. He could see the boats now. He lowered the nose still more, intending to make a low pass.

  The pirates knew the game. His orders did not permit him to open fire on the pirates unless they fired at him, which of course they would not do. They knew his orders as well as he did. Still, if he could intimidate them, make them turn away …

  “I’m taking photos.” That was the crewman in back.

  “They are alongside.” The voice was high-pitched, the words nearly impossible to understand. “I leave microphone open and move away from radio.”

  The copilot, Pigot, fidgeted in his seat.

  Sure enough, now continuous cacophony sounded in the helicopter crewmen’s ears.

  A burst of gunfire came over the radio, then the transmission ceased abruptly.

  Lieutenant Louceck was at fifty feet, making 180 knots, coming down the port side of the cruise ship. One pirate boat was against the side.

  People, all over the ship, running, some leaning over the rail, trying to see. Like ants on a corpse!

  Louceck roared right over the pirate boat, then threw the chopper into a hard turn while he pulled up on the cyclic. The chopper quickly lost speed, slowing dramatically as it came around in the turn.

  The captain of Stella Maris was holding his ship steady on course. Why didn’t he turn into the pirate boat, force them away from the ship?

  While Louceck was wondering, a hole appeared in the Plexiglas to his left. Then another.

  “They’re shooting,” Pigot roared into the ICS. His voice drowned out the cacophony coming over the radio.

  Automatically Leucock dumped his nose and began accelerating. Fortunately he was pointed right at the pirate boat. His finger found the trigger on the stick and he squeezed off a burst. A handful of 20 mm shells struck the water right beside the pirate boat, then Louceck was overhead and saw a man shooting at him with a rifle, then he was going away, his tail rotor pointing at the danger as the massive slab sides of the ship slid by the cockpit on his left.

  She looked like a floating hotel, with rows of balconies and white faces and people waving their arms at him. At him!

  Louceck checked the engine instruments and hydraulic gauges. All seemed okay … for now. Here he was, over hostile pirates, a hundred miles from the Toulon. If this machine stopped flying, he was going into the sea.

  “Any damage back there?” Louceck asked the crewman.

  “Don’t see any.” The kid’s voice was none too steady. Well, neither was Louceck’s or Pigot’s.

  Louceck climbed and turned again and looked for the other pirate boats, which were on the starboard side of the ship, toward Yemen. They were still fifty yards or so away from Stella Maris, angling in.

  Why didn’t the captain turn his ship?

  Louceck came smoothly around and lowered his nose for another pass at the pirate boat on the port side, which was still almost against the ship, with grappling hooks being thrown up toward the ship’s railings.

  Louceck flew the gun’s pipper into the pirate boat and squeezed the trigger. He held it down, walking it the length of the boat, then released it.

  “Don’t hit the ship!” Pigot roared, and automatically Louceck slammed the cyclic left, lifting the right side of his rotor disk. The ship was right there, close enough to touch. He was so engrossed in shooting at the pirates … how he had failed to hit the liner he didn’t know. A miracle.

  The pirate boat fell rapidly behind the cruise ship, foundering in the wake.

  Louceck crossed the cruise ship’s bow and began a circle of the two other pirate boats. They seemed to be holding their distance from the cruise ship Stella Maris.

  He could hear Pig
ot talking to Stella Maris’s captain, telling him to speed up and turn into the pirates. He didn’t catch the captain’s reply, but he heard Pigot call him a fool.

  Down Louceck went to ten feet off the water, slowing, flying between the pirate boats and the cruise ship.

  He had done this a dozen times in the last four months. Prevented the pirates from closing on their victim. Pirates had never before shot at him.

  To his horror, the pirates in the nearest skiff were also shooting. He saw at least four men with automatic assault rifles pointing at him, saw the muzzle flashes, felt the bullets striking the helicopter.

  He heard the crewman groan on the ICS.

  Louceck already had picked up the tail and was accelerating away. He would come around and sink this boat, too.

  Halfway through his turn Pigot pointed to the left engine instruments. The engine was overheating, losing power. Now he looked back as he turned. Black smoke behind him.

  Falling oil pressure.

  The crewman was on the ICS. “I’m hit,” he said. “In the leg.”

  Pigot began unstrapping as Louceck shut the left engine down and turned toward the Toulon, one hundred miles away. Pigot maneuvered himself out of his seat and went aft to look after the crewman.

  Damn, damn and double damn.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mustafa and his pirates had Sultan of the Seas in sight. He was on her beam. She was making at least twenty-five knots. He had to hold in eighty degrees of lead as he closed to keep her from moving to his front.

  The men in the boat grasped their weapons. A few fired short bursts into the air in celebratory anticipation. The reports sounded flat.

  Mustafa’s radio was alive in his hand. He could hear the other boats attacking Stella Maris talking to each other. He breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the helicopter had left trailing smoke. One skiff sunk. If anyone who had been aboard was still alive, he was on his own; Mustafa needed all his boats if he hoped to capture a cruise ship. The men knew that, knew the risks, and had come anyway. At least there were two more skiffs to harass Stella Maris, which was only ten miles to the northeast.

  “Mustafa, this is Ahmed.”

  “Yes.”

  “We are closing from the north on Sultan. Do you have us in sight?”

  “No.”

  They had the cruise ship in a classic trap. Pirates were closing from two sides, so whichever way Sultan of the Seas turned, she would be intercepted.

  Yes! The plan was working!

  * * *

  Captain Arch Penney was facing his worst nightmare: a pirate attack on his ship. He had two boatloads of pirates to port and four to starboard. Ten miles ahead, two or three pirate boats were attacking another cruise ship.

  Penney was on the radiotelephone to the Task Force 151 tactical action officer on duty this morning. The navy guy had a calm, baritone American voice.

  “Nearest surface warship is an hour and a half away,” the American navy dude said, “but we will have a helo overhead in twenty minutes.”

  “Send it.”

  Penney handed the phone to Harry Zopp and consulted the computer screen that showed all the surface targets in the area, their course and speed, and the prediction of where they would be in a minute, or five or ten, if they didn’t change course or speed. The computer’s information was derived from the radar. The computer operator had to designate which targets were which.

  Arch was not without a plan. He and the other captains of the cruise line, together with the senior captain, had worked out a contingency plan for just such an attack and presented it to management, which had insisted upon some changes designed to protect the company from lawsuits, then approved it.

  The plan was The Plan. Unfortunately cruise ships did not carry weapons of any kind, not even a pistol to take down a raving, homicidal berserker. So The Plan relied upon speed and mild maneuvering to keep boatloads of armed, homicidal pirates at bay. However, the cruise line was not willing to have the pirates slaughter a great many of its customers, so if the pirates persisted in shooting into the cruise ship, the captain was supposed to surrender, on the theory that the pirates would then ransom ship, passengers and crew. It all sounded very logical in the boardroom of the cruise company in London.

  “We have insured against the risk,” the chairman told Captain Penney. Ah, yes. Insurance. Even if the company had to refund fares and ransom ship, passengers and crew and pay a few families damages because they lost a family member, the cruise line wasn’t going to lose money. Comforting, that.

  Sultan of the Seas carried 490 passengers and 370 officers and crew. Eight hundred sixty defenseless people. Still, the international task force, Task Force 151, was out there on patrol, just over the horizon, ready to intimidate those naughty pirates and protect honest people from violent, unwashed, starving Africans.

  “Don’t worry, Captain,” the chairman had said. “You can outrun them. The allied navies can deal with them.”

  Arch Penney looked again at the computer display. If he maintained this course and speed, the helo would arrive eight minutes after the pirates.

  Eight minutes. How many people would the pirates maim and kill in eight minutes?

  He picked up the mike for the ship’s public address system and flipped it on.

  “This is the captain. As you may know if you are on the weather decks, we are being intercepted by at least six small boats, which may contain pirates. We will do all we can to protect you and this ship. I request everyone to clear the weather decks and move to the interior of the ship, away from the windows, balconies and portholes. If your stateroom has a balcony, please step out into the passageway and remain there. I will keep you updated.”

  He switched off.

  Harry looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Going to panic the old pussies, aren’t you?”

  Arch Penney shrugged and used his handheld radio to call the bosun. “Are you ready?”

  “Two minutes.”

  “Use the LRAD whenever they get in range.” The Long Range Acoustic Device aimed a powerful sound blast in a narrow cone. At one hundred yards, the high-pitched wail was painful. At fifty yards, it was capable of rupturing eardrums. The ship had four LRADs installed, two on each side.

  Now Penney asked the computer operator, “Where’s that chopper?”

  “One-two-two degrees true at forty-eight miles.”

  “Our speed?”

  “Twenty-eight knots and increasing,” Harry Zopp said. “We are full ahead, sir.”

  “Very well. Helmsman, use slow rate on the turn and come starboard to course one-two-zero degrees. Steady on it.” These new cruise liners had no rudder, but instead had engines in pods mounted below the hull. The helmsman was actually turning the pods. Maneuvering up to a pier, the pods allowed the ship to be turned in its own length and dispensed with the necessity of using tugboats.

  “Slow rate on the turn,” echoed the helmsman. “Come starboard and steady up on one-two-zero degrees, sir.”

  The slow rate of turn wouldn’t tilt the deck very much, although the ship would take a while to get through the turn. With luck, Arch Penney thought he could get the pirates into his rear quarter. At the very least, the last two boats, out of Yemen, would be behind him in a tail chase.

  * * *

  U.S. Navy Lieutenant Buck Peterson was the pilot in command of the Sikorsky MH-60R on its way toward the two cruise ships under attack by pirates.

  This had started out as just another day at sea, with coffee and eggs and reams of paperwork awaiting his attention. USS Richard Ward only carried one helo, three pilots, two enlisted crewmen and two aviation mechanics. As the senior aviator, he owned the flying machine and the officers and men-and was responsible for everything.

  When the call came from the task force commander, he had mounted up with the senior copilot and senior crewman, a first class named Wilsey. The captain already had his ship on a rendezvous heading, and he turned into the wind just long enough to let
the chopper lift off.

  Now Buck Peterson was on the radio to the flagship. Pirates had fired on a French Panther over Stella Maris, and the Frenchie had sunk one boat, then retired. Still iffy whether he was going to make his base ship or go into the drink. Two boats were still shooting at Stella Maris; the captain was in a panic, but he said he thought he could outrun them. He was slowly pulling away, leaving them behind.

  The flagship gave Peterson a heading to Sultan of the Seas. It was being intercepted by six boats, which had it boxed.

  “Wilsey, you got that gun loaded?” Buck asked on the intercom.

  “Yes, sir.” As crewman, Petty Officer Wilsey was in charge of the helicopter’s only defensive armament, an M-60 machine gun mounted in the door. It wasn’t a cannon, but it threw a nice stream of 7.62 mm NATO slugs that could slaughter a boatload of pirates in seconds. Peterson had never had to order the gunner to fire; the sight of the gun pointed their way was always enough to dissuade even the most ardent buccaneers. There was just nowhere to hide, nothing to get behind, in an open boat. Every single pirate thought that gun barrel was pointed precisely at him.

  Peterson checked the mileage to the Sultan while he listened to her captain talking on the radio to the Task Force 151 duty officer aboard the flagship.

  Peterson’s copilot was Crash Pizzino, a big rangy man with a wicked sense of humor. He wasn’t smiling now. He was tightening his straps, running through the checklist, securing loose objects in the cockpit. Crash was also listening to the Sultan’s captain describe the tactical scene, the pirate skiffs closing in …

  * * *

  “My God, Suzanne! Pirates!”

  “We could be in Hawaii this very minute, sister of mine. I wanted to go to Hawaii. Remember?”

  “We’ve been to Hawaii five times,” Irene said distractedly. They were crammed into a passageway just forward of the ninth deck aft dining room and the outside portico where they had eaten breakfast. Someone had spotted the open boats on the horizon, and people had idly turned to watch as the skiffs closed on a collision course. Then the captain had galvanized everyone into action.