Champagne flutes tumbled as multiple explosions jolted Aurora. The ship shuddered as her active stabilizers seemed momentarily confused by the irregular shockwaves and labored to compensate for the unanticipated disruption to her equilibrium.
“What was that?” asked Celeste.
Alex said nothing, but even with the din of the music from the deck below, she recognized the cracking resonance of military-grade high explosives. A gray-blue cloud of smoke rolled over the ship’s gunwales, engulfing them in a pungent, slightly sweet odor that she tasted as much as smelled. It brought with it a long-ago memory of a grape hut on the side of a mountain in Afghanistan.
She caught a flash of light out of the corner of her eye. “Incoming!” she shouted. “RPG! Get down!”
A fiery streak of light illuminated the deck as it passed. The projectile’s path ended in another cracking explosion somewhere on a deck above them, confirming her suspicions.
What the hell?
She ran to the side of the ship and saw the shadowy outlines of multiple rigid-hulled inflatable boats—RHIBs for short—not far from the megayacht.
“What’s happening? Why are we under attack?” Celeste’s questions weren’t directed at anyone in particular.
The what was easy—multiple bogeys were assaulting Aurora. The why was less important for now. All that mattered was getting Madame Clicquot and Valtteri Lehtonen to safety.
“Do you have a panic room?”
Valtteri stared straight ahead, wide-eyed, mouth agape, but he didn’t answer.
“Valtteri!” She raised her voice to punch through the fight-or-flight response his autonomic nervous system was eliciting.
Around them, lightning flashed, except it wasn’t lightning. More explosions thundered from below. Panicked screams from the ship’s guests, who until a few moments ago had been enjoying the percussive beat from the DJ’s playlist, filled the night.
“A panic room,” Alex demanded again, finally catching Valtteri’s attention. “You must have a secure room on a ship like this. Where is it?”
They had to get moving. They were sitting ducks out here in the open. She grabbed Celeste by the hand and pushed Valtteri toward the ship’s bow and the staircase they had ascended earlier. Another flash of light appeared off the side of the ship. She recognized it as the blowback of an RPG launch from one of the small boats encircling them.
“Get down!” she yelled.
They hit the deck as a rocket-propelled grenade shot past, impacting less than a hundred feet behind them before exploding in a blinding splash of fire and melted steel. The overpressure wave hit her in the chest like a Lennox Lewis punch. Her sinuses hurt. Her ears were ringing. She kept Celeste and Valtteri on the deck long enough for the debris to finish showering down around them.
“Anybody hurt?” she asked, checking them over for shrapnel injuries, seeing none. “Let’s move,” she said, calmly but with urgency.
“Not that way,” said Valtteri. “Belowdecks, aft of the crew mess. There’s a citadel room there.”
He led them rearward along the vessel’s port side, beyond where the RPG had impacted and detonated. They dodged burning debris on the way to the staircase, Alex tiptoeing to avoid having her bare feet shredded by fragments of jagged shrapnel. She felt a sharp stab in her right foot but pressed onward. Smoke billowed as Valtteri pulled open the door. A large man spilled out, hacking and coughing, a pistol extended. Alex grabbed his arm and deftly locked up his gun hand, then flipped him onto his stomach. Still in control of his wrist, she relieved him of his firearm. She was about to strike him in the back of the head with the butt of his SIG Sauer when Valtteri called out.
“Wait!” he shouted. Alex paused, her arm cocked in midair. “He’s the head of my security team.”
“You couldn’t have mentioned that sooner?”
She climbed off him, straightening her dress. The man gave her a once-over as she covered her exposed thigh. He seemed perturbed that a woman in a tropical print halter dress could have bested him.
Valtteri added the requisite introductions. “Alex, this is Iain Street. Street, Alex.”
Just then, two men wearing dark, unmarked military uniforms and carrying rifles appeared from behind a bulkhead twenty meters away. As they leveled their guns at the group, Alex dropped into a low crouch and fired two shots past Street, dropping the lead tango. The head of security pushed Celeste and Valtteri to cover as the second tango fired a burst that struck the door to the stairs behind them. Alex dove out of the way, coming out of her somersault behind a steel pillar and returning fire. Her first shot missed, but the next two found their mark, and the second tango dropped like a heavy sack next to his companion.
She covered left, right, then to her rear to ensure there were no more surprises.
“Street?”
“We’re good,” he said.
She glanced over her shoulder at him while keeping the gun trained to her front. “Give me more, Street. What’s happening?”
He hacked again from the smoke he had taken in. “We counted four Zodiac RHIBs. Not sure where they came from.” He spoke with a pronounced accent—Scottish, she thought. “By the time we picked them up on the ship’s radar, it was too late to establish their origin before the fireworks began.”
“These aren’t your men, I take it?”
“That pair of numpty ballbags? No way.”
Yup, Scottish for sure. “How many tangos?”
“Thermal showed four badgers in each boat—three assaulters and a driver.”
“Badgers?” Alex asked.
“Badgers and doves, Alex. Old SAS terminology for bad guys and their hostages or victims.”
So, out of sixteen men attacking the ship, there could be as many as twelve already onboard, minus these two.
“And then there were ten,” she mumbled.
“Are these pirates?” asked Celeste.
“Once upon a time, maybe,” she answered. “But here and now on the Mediterranean Sea, kitted out like that? These are no Barbary Coast privateers, ma’am.” Then to Street, “What about your men?”
“Down to eight, including myself. They’re engaging the ones that boarded.” The sound of muted gunfire from somewhere else on the ship punctuated the air. “But I’m afraid we’re outnumbered and probably outgunned.”
She nodded, handing him back his pistol.
“I’ll get these two to the panic room,” he added. “You good for now?”
“I will be.”
“Good.”
“Go,” she said.
Valtteri’s arm was already around Celeste’s shoulders, steering her toward the stairwell.
“Wait,” Celeste said, pulling free. “Alex, what are you going to do?”
She shrugged.
“No, Alex. You don’t even have any shoes, let alone your gun. And look, you’re bleeding!”
Alex glanced at her feet, where a small puddle of blood had formed. She had kicked off her boat shoes earlier and been padding around barefoot since the ship came under attack.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. She tore a long strip of material off the bottom of her dress, wound it around her foot, and tied it off with a square knot. “Street, get them to safety. Do you have comms?”
He nodded. “Take this.” He was about to throw her his radio.
“No, keep it. You’ll need it to coordinate with your men.”
“If you get to the bridge,” he said, “there’s a room at the back, behind the charting table. Grab a radio from there.” He turned and herded the couple toward the stairs. “We declared a Mayday and activated our ship security alert system, including the multi-frequency EPIRB—the emergency position-indicating radio beacon,” he called over his shoulder. “But out here, it could take twenty, thirty minutes at least for someone to get to us, if at all.”
Guess we’re going it alone, then.
She glanced at the Rolex Submariner on her wrist: 9:52 P.M.
The three disappeared down the stairs as Alex stepped to the corpses she had created, relieving the first of his rifle, an FN SCAR-L.
She rolled the fallen assailant onto his back with her knee and took two spare mags from the load-bearing vest he wore over his body armor, slipping one into a slash pocket in her dress. She’d have preferred to take the whole vest, but prying it off him would have left her defenseless and exposed for too long, validating her maxim that a dress without pockets was about as useful as retroreflective camo.
She stepped behind the bulkhead for cover while she inspected her new weapon. The firing selector was pointing to A for full auto. She ejected the magazine that was half full of ammunition and swapped it out for one of the full thirty-round mags.
Send me, she thought.