Marty saw the dude first. He was standing where the bow rose to the upswept prow. The first thing he noticed was that he wasn’t dressed like the others. He wasn’t in rolled-up pants and bare chest, or tatty torn undershirt, or stained robes. He wore regular clothes, a sport shirt and slacks. The second thing he noticed was that he was shouting back toward the enclosed cockpit they steered these things from.
Things happened fast after that. The dhow was still on its way out;
The only trouble was, Team Gold was between them and it. And the dhow was about eighty times the displacement of the inflatable, and didn’t look like it intended to lose this game of chicken.
“That them?” the coxswain yelled. “Want me to head for ’em?”
He was opening his mouth to give him the order when the fellow in the sport shirt bent down and picked up what looked like an AK, but with a longer barrel. And before Marty could reorient his brain to say something else, he started firing.
The bursts blew water into the air between the two boats, then, as the firer corrected, all around them. Then Marty was yelling. Cassidy was screaming, the coxswain was twisting the wheel into a tight turn away.
Lizard got the first burst off. Then the others, Crack Man, Snack Cake, Deuce jumped in with deafening cracks that blended into a roar as somebody else opened up from the dhow. The M-14s weren’t so great in the confined spaces of a boarded trawler, but over the fifty yards that separated them from the dhow their heavy, high-velocity bullets hit hard. The windows of the dhow opened up with flashes, and two more guys popped up at the stern and began firing, too.
Then Sasquatch opened up with the M-60 and brass really started flying. He got on the pilothouse and shot out all the windows, took one of the stern guys out as he straightened, started to aim, instead caught a burst in the chest and tumbled backward. Then the big seaman started stitching fire into the engine area, below the empty windows where now they couldn’t see any flashes, any activity at all.
Which was good, except the dhow was still coming on. Still headed for the channel and the ship. He couldn’t see anybody at the helm, but the inside of the pilothouse was a black hole.
The helicopter had come back, skating around above them like the sky was blue ice. It kept moving, which he guessed was a survival tactic. He wouldn’t want to come in at a hover above guys with whatever it was the man in the blue shirt had been firing.
Meanwhile the coxswain had come back around and they were headed right back toward the oncoming prow. So that all Marty had to do was lean over and say, pointing, “Put her right there.”
“Right there?”
“The bow. Right there.” He told Cassidy what he was going to do. The ensign nodded. He was gripping the roll bar on the center console with one hand, his pistol with the other. He hadn’t fired yet, though everyone else had.
Marchetti switched his attention back to the swiftly closing hull. It was rippling along through the green water, still on its steady course. He couldn’t scrub from his mind the thought that any moment now he’d see a flash and the next number would be the singing angels. He unslung the twelve-gauge, jacked a round, and put the bead on the gunwale. Which grew quickly, loomed over them. He squatted suddenly and braced just as the coxswain ran the blunt air-padded bow full into the side of the dhow at about ten knots.
It staggered everyone in the boat. The motors roared as they rebounded, like throwing a basketball against a concrete wall, but the coxswain kept her aimed where Marchetti had pointed and drove right back in again. She snarled ahead, pressing with all the power of his steadily advanced throttles against the dhow’s bow. Like a little rubber tugboat, crowded up against the paint and rust and caked salt in a meat-grinder snarl of hard rubber and plastic against steel. He leaned back, trying to keep the bead where anybody leaning over the side to shoot down would first appear. But they didn’t, and the Johnsons howled, and Crack Man reared back and the grapnel went sailing up, line uncoiling behind it.
