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“How many do you estimate are still aboard?”
“Forty-three precisely. And that includes the rebels you trapped down near the hold. The guard you left unconscious under the stairs has already been taken care of. He came awake the moment he was tossed into the water.”
“Tell Eric to make ready to pull away from the dock.”
“What do we do with the pirates still roaming around the superstructure?” Linda asked.
“Lock it down, and get the armorer up here with tranq guns and NVGs.”
In the op center, Linda relayed Juan’s orders. On the big monitor she watched as a group of kids was trying to dodge the powerful spray from one of the water cannons, turning it into a game of dare. From her seat in the middle of the room, she hit a toggle to take command of that particular cannon and cut the flow of water. The kids stopped dashing around, looking like their favorite toy had been taken away. Linda adjusted the aim and electronically opened the valve again. The blast caught the boys at the knees, knocking all six flat and tumbling them like flotsam toward the boarding stairs. They didn’t stop rolling until they landed on the dock in a sodden tangle of limbs. The boys quickly got to their feet and fled into the village.
“Locking down now,” Mark Murphy said after typing at his workstation for a moment. He made the last keystroke, and all over the ship hidden steel shutters slammed closed over every door, hatch, and window, effectively sealing the entire superstructure.
A cat might have been able to maneuver in such darkness, but a man without night vision goggles was as good as blind.
Linda switched the internal cameras to thermal imaging and scanned the feeds until she had checked every compartment and hallway. There were still thirteen people locked inside the ship. When she switched the cameras to low-light mode, she made out that they were all armed men. Over the speakers, she could hear them calling out to one another, but no one dared move from where he stood.
Just as Linda finished her sweep, Juan came over the radio. “How do we look?”
“We’ve got thirteen. The pirates who were in the mess are out in the hallway now with the others you tangled with, so I’d say you’re clear.”
“Good enough for me.”
“Happy hunting.”
Two decks above, Juan doused the lights in the hallway and slid a pair of third-generation night vision goggles over his eyes. In his hand he carried a sleek-looking pistol with walnut grips and an especially long barrel. Powered by compressed gas, the tranquilizer gun could fire ten needles laced with a sedative so potent it would drop an average-sized man in ten seconds. While that may sound like a short amount of time, it could give a gunman ample opportunity to loosen an entire magazine from an automatic weapon—hence the darkness.
Eddie and Linc were similarly armed.
Cabrillo opened the secret door again. Through the goggles, the world had gone an eerie shade of green. Reflective surfaces shone a bright white that could be distracting had Juan and his people not been so used to NVGs. When the hatch closed behind them, they padded forward until they were pressed to the mess hall door. The air still smelled sharply of smoke.
“There are three of them to your right,” Linda said over the tactical net. “Ten feet down the corridor and moving away from you.”
Using hand signals, Juan relayed the information to his men and like wraiths out of a nightmare they slid out the mess and took aim simultaneously. The tranquilizer guns gave a soft whisper, and even before the darts found their marks Cabrillo and the others were back in the mess.
The barbs hit the men in their shoulders, the ultrafine needles having no trouble piercing clothing and lodging in flesh. The sharp sting made all three whirl around, and one opened fire in panic. The muzzle flash revealed an empty corridor, and for the second time in twelve hours Malik and Aziz were chasing ghosts.
“This ship is crewed by evil djinns,” Aziz managed to wail before he was overtaken by the drug. Malik, who was a larger man, swayed for a moment before he, too, tumbled flat, landing on the unconscious third rebel.
“Ten to go,” Linda said. “But we’ve got another problem.”
“Talk to me,” Juan said tersely.
“The pirates on shore are getting organized. There’s some guy rallying them to reboard the Oregon. He has maybe twenty-five or thirty looking like they’re going to try it.”
“Am I on the speakers?”
“Affirmative.”
“Mark, pop open one of the deck .30s and scatter that crowd. Eric, pull us away.”
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.
