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Pitt didn't understand a word. He called back. "Pouvez vous me recommander un bon restaurant?"
"`What did Dirk say?" Giordino asked Gunn.
"Good Lord!" Gunn moaned. "He just asked the head honcho to recommend a good restaurant."
The gunboats were slowly drifting past on both sides as Pitt kept the sport craft idling in gear against the current. Matabu again ordered Pitt to stop and prepare to be boarded.
Pitt stiffened and tried to look suave and disarming.
"J'aimerais une bouteille de Martin Ray Chardonnay."
"Now what's he saying?" demanded Giordino.
Gunn sounded lost. "I think he ordered a bottle of California wine."
"Next, he'll ask to borrow a jar of Grey Poupon Mustard," Giordino muttered.
"He must be trying to stall them until they drift past us."
On board the gunboat, Matabu and Ketou's faces registered a total lack of comprehension as Pitt called out, this time in his native tongue.
"I do not understand Swahili. Can you try English?"
Matabu pounded on the bridge counter in exasperation and growing anger. He was not used to humored indifference. He replied in broken English that Pitt could barely decipher. "I am Admiral Pierre Matabu, Chief of the National Benin Navy," he announced pompously. "Stop your engines and heave-to for inspection. Heave-to or I will give the order to fire."
Pitt nodded furiously and waved both hands in a gesture of compliance. "Yes, yes, don't shoot. Please don't shoot."
The cockpit of the Calliope was slowly coming even with the stern of Matabu's gunboat. Pitt kept just enough distance between the two boats to make it impossible for anyone but an Olympic broadjumper to leap across the gap. Two crewmen threw lines on Pitt's bow and stern decks, but he made no move toward them.
"Tie the lines," Ketou ordered.
"Too far away," Pitt shrugged. He held up a hand and made a half arc. "Hold on. I'll come around."
Not waiting for a reply, he eased the throttles forward and swung the helm so that the sport yacht slowly slipped into a 180-degree turn around the stern of the gunboat before straightening out and pulling up along the opposite side of the hull. Now both vessels were on a parallel course, bows pointed downriver. Pitt noted with no small amount of satisfaction that the 30-millimeter guns could not depress low enough to strike the Calliope's cockpit.
Matabu stared down at Pitt, eyes gloating, a smile of triumph beginning to spread across his thick jowls. Ketou didn't share his superior's wolfish expression. His face wore a very suspicious look indeed.
Calmly, still grinning, Pitt waited until Giordino's turret was directly in line with the gunboat's engine room. Keeping one hand on th
e wheel, he casually reached under the chair and grasped the stock of the grenade launcher. Then he spoke softly into the microphone on his headset.
"Helicopter dead ahead. Gunboat to starboard. Okay, gentlemen, it's show time. Let's take 'em!"
As Pitt spoke, Giordino dropped the shield around his engine room turret and unleashed a rapier missile that ran straight and true into the helicopter's fuel tanks. Gunn popped up from the forward hatch two modified M-16 automatic rifles clamped under each armpit, both hands gripping and squeezing the triggers, muzzles blazing, blowing away the men manning the 30-millimeter guns as though they were chaff spewed from a grain combine. Pitt aimed the muzzle of the grenade launcher into the air and fired the first of his incendiary/concussion grenades over Matabu's vessel onto the superstructure of the second. Unable to see the backup gunboat, he fired blindly, judging a trajectory that would drop on his target. The grenade bounced off a winch into the river, exploding with a thunderous boom underwater. The next lob missed the boat completely, bursting with the same result.
Matabu could never have been prepared for the horrific spectacle that exploded around him. It seemed to him as though the sky and air suddenly tore apart. His mind accepted only fleetingly in one stunned glimpse the total disintegration of the helicopter. It erupted in a giant fireball that was followed by a mushroom burst of shattered debris that rained down in a fiery torrent onto the river.
"The white bastards tricked us!" Ketou yelled in abrupt anger at having swallowed the bait. He rushed to the rail and furiously shook his fist at the Calliope. "Depress guns and fire!" he screamed at his gun crews.
"Too late!" Matabu cried in terror. The Admiral panicked and crouched there, frozen into immobility as he watched his crew crumple and die under the tearing slugs of Gunn's weapons. He stared petrified in disbelieving shock at the obscenely twisted corpses around the silent guns, all lying sprawled in fetal attitudes, their gore spreading across the deck. Matabu's mind simply could not accept a clandestine ship masquerading as an innocent yacht under a respected flag with the firepower to turn his comfortable little world into a horror. The stranger standing at the helm of the deadly boat had turned surprise into a tactical asset. Matabu's men were overwhelmed with shock they seemed unable to shake off. They milled about like cattle in a thunderstorm, caught off balance and struck with fear, falling without firing a shot in response. He realized then with blood-chilling certainty that he was going to die; he realized it when the turret above the stern of the sport yacht spun and unleashed another missile point blank against the gunboat that penetrated the wooden hull and struck a generator in the engine room before detonating.
At almost the same moment, Pitt's third toss struck home. Miraculously, the grenade impacted on a bulkhead and ricocheted into an open hatch of the second gunboat. In a concert of explosions, it exploded in a roar of flame, setting off the ammunition and cannon shells in the boat's magazine. Flying debris and swirling smoke shot up in an umbrella of splintered bulkheads, ventilators, pieces of lifeboats, and broken bodies. Shockingly, the gunboat ceased to exist. The shock wave came like a sledgehammer and drove Matabu's vessel hard against the sport yacht, knocking Pitt off his feet.
Giordino's missile blasted the gunboat's engine room into a holocaust of shredded metal and slashed timbers. Water gushed in through a massive hole ripped out of the bottom, and the gunboat began to sink quickly. Virtually the whole interior was a blazing bedlam with fiery tongues darting through the open ports. Veins of oily black smoke curled and billowed into the tropical air before drifting over the forested riverbank.
With no targets left standing at the guns or on the decks, Gunn fired his final rounds at the two figures on the bridge. Two slugs tore into Matabu's chest. He rose to his feet, stood there for several moments, hands in a death grip on the bridge railing, staring dumbly at the blood staining his immaculate uniform. Then he slowly sagged to the deck in a fat, inert lump.
For several seconds a desperate silence fell over the river, broken by the soft crackling of burning surface oil. Then abruptly, like a shriek from the very pits of hell, an agonized voice screamed out over the water.
