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The assault team leader grinned as he saw a hot white plume rising from the target vessel. The eighty-foot motor yacht, was still a good half-mile away, too far out for him to see the crew, even with his enhanced night-vision goggles, but the smoke was impossible to miss.
“Well that explains why they’re slowing,” he said into the throat mic of his Motorola tactical radio. “Looks like they blew an engine. Stay frosty, gents. They know we’re coming, and if they’re armed, we can expect a warm welcome.”
The five shooters acknowledged with mumbled affirmatives. They were already hunkered down behind the gunwales of the sixty-five-foot cabin cruiser, weapons cocked, locked and ready to rock at the first sign of incoming fire.
The leader would have preferred to simply drill the boat full of holes from a distance, but his handler had promised a bonus if they recovered any useful material—computers, written notes and photographs, artifacts—and that would be a lot harder to do if the motor yacht was shot all to hell.
He secretly hoped the other crew would surrender without a fight. That would certainly make killing them a lot easier.
He waited until they had closed to within a hundred yards of the drifting yacht before giving the order to back off the throttles. A haze of smoke hung over the other vessel, and the salt air was tinged with the odor of burning oil, but there was no sign of activity aboard.
The assault team leader didn’t like that one bit. “Anyone got eyes on?” he said, subvocalizing into the mic.
The replies came back one at a time—all negative.
His 2IC—second-in-command—who was standing beside him, manning the auxiliary helm on the flying bridge, wrapped it up succinctly. “They’re either hiding below decks or they bugged out.”
The leader’s instincts told him the other crew was still on the target vessel, but he had to consider all the possibilities. “I don’t see their dinghy. Could we have missed them taking off?”
“We would have seen the heat from an outboard on IR.”
“Not if they were rowing.”
The 2IC shrugged in the darkness.
“Okay, let’s assume they’re still there, waiting to jump out when we try to board. I want you covering the hatches from here while we go over tactically, and clear the objective top down.”
“Shouldn’t we fire a shot across their bow? Give ‘em a chance to surrender?”
“Nah. Why waste a bullet?” The leader keyed his mic again. “Go on my signal. And if you see anything moving, shoot to kill.”
The jolt that vibrated through the hull as the blacked-out pursuit boat bumped up against Sea Foam, was Maddock’s signal to move. He gave Corey’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze, then dipped his head below the black water, and began moving his legs in a powerful scissors-kick. The long diving-flippers on his feet supplied extra energy to each kick, allowing him to move through the water with a minimum of effort, and more importantly, without creating a disturbance that might be visible to anyone on the other boat looking for him.
Reasoning that the attackers would have superior numbers, Maddock had made the decision to avoid a head-on confrontation. After setting a small oil fire on the deck near the engine hatch to simulate a breakdown, he and Corey—the only member of his crew with no military experience—had gone into the water on the sheltered side of the boat. Matt Barnaby would remain aboard to ‘greet’ the boarding party.
Maddock kept one hand extended out before him, maintaining contact with Sea Foam’s hull until he reached the waterline. Although he couldn’t see a thing, he knew the other boat was there, right in front of him, and that if he wasn’t careful, he might smack his head against the hull. Even if the impact didn’t knock him unconscious, it would almost certainly reveal his presence to the crew, taking away his one advantage: the element of surprise.
He groped forward with both hands until his fingers encountered something solid—the hull of the second boat. He rested his fingers against it, feeling faint vibrations as the vessel rocked gently in the calm seas. High above, he knew, the boarding party was crossing over to seize their prize.
He was running out of time.
He kicked forward again, swimming fast but smooth, until he reached the far side of the boat. He surfaced quietly near the bow, then worked his way down its length to the stern. Although the sky was overcast, hiding moon and stars, the darkness on the surface was by no means absolute. A stripe of faint blue-green lit up the water near the aft-end of the boat—bioluminescent plankton stirred up by the churning screws—and a silvery haze smudged the sky, marking the moon’s location in the heavens. It was just enough to reveal the silhouette of the boat above him.
Moving slow and stealthy in order to avoid literally rocking the boat, he crawled up onto the swim platform where he slipped off his flippers and took his Walther from the ZipLoc bag he’d used to keep it dry. He was just about to check the luminous dial of his watch to see how much time he had left when he heard the pop and hiss of an Orion Starblazer aerial signal flare shooting five hundred feet up into the sky.
Maddock kept his head down, eyes averted from the tiny red sun that blossomed into existence high overhead.
Perfect timing, Corey. Maddock thought as he rolled over the transom.
He knew the flare would only last a few seconds, but while it burned, it would level the playing field a little and if the attackers were using some kind of night-vision tech, as he was almost certain they were, then it might just give him an advantage. Bright light could temporarily disable night observations devices—NODs—or even briefly blind a man wearing them.
Maddock swept the pistol back and forth, searching the rear deck for targets, but there was no one there. The bad guys were all evidently on Sea Foam.
He kept moving, running for the ladder-like steps up to the flying bridge, then bounding up them. As his head cleared the deck, he spied someone at the helm controls. The man was little more than a shadow, outlined in red. He wore black tactical gear, his face hidden by a matching balaclava and a set of NODs, which he was evidently trying to reset. His head snapped toward Maddock and his hands dropped to the pistol holstered at his belt.
That was when the flare went out, plunging the world once more into darkness.
Maddock fired once, the muzzle flash revealing that his target had already moved, then shifted his aimpoint and fired two more shots.
The night erupted in gunfire.
Maddock leapt up onto the flying bridge and threw himself flat on the deck. He was pretty sure he’d hit the man with both shots; if he hadn’t, he would know pretty soon. In any case, the shooting was all coming from Sea Foam; evidently, the boarding party had met a little resistance.
Keep your head down, Matt.
He groped forward until his hands encountered the unmoving form of the man he’d just shot. His fingers slid across familiar textures—Nomex and nylon webbing, similar to gear he had worn on SEAL missions. The man wore a tactical vest, festooned with pouches for magazines, grenades and other gear. Maddock kept going until his hands found what he was really after: the man’s NODs.
He wrestled them off the man’s head and held them up to his own eye, working the power button to turn them on.
Aside from a faint streak across the display—the after-image of the flare—the world was revealed in glorious green-tinged monochrome. The first thing he saw was the would-be attacker lying supine on the deck in front of him. The man was still alive, stirring and groaning in pain as he struggled to stay conscious. Maddock’s aim had been dead-on, but his opponent’s tactical vest was more than just a place to store extra gear. It had Kevlar inserts and plate hanger, both of which had stopped the rounds from the Walther cold.
The man’s eyes flashed open, his pupils already dilating to adjust for the darkness. In the display of the NODs they looked like the glowing orbs of some supernatural entity.
He can’t see me, Maddock thought.
Then the man’s hands shot out and closed around his neck.
Maddock reflexively tried to pry the fingers loose, dropping both the NODs and his Walther in the process. That was about all he accomplished. The man’s stranglehold felt like an iron band across his throat. He could feel his pulse throbbing, his blood forcibly dammed before it could deliver life-sustaining oxygen to his brain. Through the fog, he could hear the man shouting, calling out to his comrades for assistance.
Maddock knew he would not be able to break the man’s grip, not in the second or two left before he lost consciousness, so he pushed back the primal impulse to struggle, and instead met the problem head-on. He reached out and grabbed the man’s head in both hands and smashed his forehead into the bridge of the man’s nose.
The impact sent a flash of pain through Maddock’s skull, and the sound of cartilage snapping reverberated through his cranium, but mercifully, the stranglehold slackened enough for him to squirm free. He thrust the man away from him, slamming his head into the deck until the man stopped struggling.
As the fog lifted, Maddock heard answering shouts from below. At least some of the boarding party were crossing back to their vessel in response to the calls for help. He had no idea how many he would be facing, but knew that his Walther wouldn’t be enough to stop them, especially if they were all wearing body armor.
He needed something a lot more powerful.
Groping in the darkness, he quickly found the stunned man’s tactical vest, tore open one of the pouches and pulled out a baseball-sized object. Muscle memory took over from there. He deftly stripped off the metal safety band, slipped a finger through the split-ring dangling from the arming pin, yanked it out, and then, with an almost indifferent flick of his hand, he tossed the fragmentation grenade out onto the rear deck of the cabin cruiser.
As soon as the grenade left his hand, Maddock dove over the control console and slid down the sloped superstructure onto the foredeck. In the faint light, he could make out a human form moving right in front of him. There was a shout, and then a muzzle flash as the man started shooting. The air around Maddock sizzled with incoming rounds, the Plexiglas window cracking with multiple impacts. Maddock kept moving, rolling toward the shooter, praying the grenade would detonate before the gunman got a bead on him. He figured the superstructure would shield them both from the blast and the deadly spray of hot metal, but hopefully the explosion would distract the man long enough for him to—
There was a flash, and then he was weightless and spiraling down into the darkness.