biggest problem we have is below,” he said.
Gunner knew what he meant. Emma Simms. “If it dawns on her that she’s the cause of this…” he said.
“She’ll go nuts,” Nolan finished the thought for him. “Or get even nuttier.”
“If that’s possible,” Gunner said.
Nolan drained the last of his drink.
“I’ll bet in a million years she never dreamed she’d wind up here,” he said. “With us, with those poor people below, with a bump on her head or a lesion on her brain or whatever the hell happened to her.”
He threw his cup overboard.
“I guess being the world’s most famous movie star isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” he said.
* * *
THEY WENT UP to the bridge where they found the five Senegals. They were just as hot and exhausted as he and Gunner.
Nolan expressed his thoughts on the Bom-Kats’ actions. The Senegals could only agree.
“Le monde devient fou sur une belle femme,” one said.
The world goes crazy over one beautiful woman …
Nolan laughed grimly. He replied: “Toute ce qu’il faut est une…”
All it takes is one …
They spent the next few minutes taking inventory of their ammunition supply. The results were disheartening.
They had six M4s between them, all of them adapted to be belt fed. The problem was they had more empty belts than full ones. In all they had just 223 rounds. Split six ways, that was not a lot. In any kind of major firefight, 223 rounds could be gone in a matter of seconds.
Gunner’s ammo supply was especially low. He’d gone ashore at Gottabang with a full load in his Streetsweeper—but he’d expended 95 percent of his shells in the battle against the beach’s security forces and while repelling the first two pirate attacks. Now he had just three shells left, all of them of the incendiary variety.
Each man also had a Beretta sidearm—but there were no extra clips for them. And there were definitely no other firearms on the ship, nor were any of the Korean crewmen armed.
At the end of it, Gunner said, “We might be kinda screwed here.”
Nolan could only agree. “We’ve got to come up with some other kind of weapon,” he said. “Something outside the box.”
Gunner looked around the barren bridge. “Something like what? There’s not much of anything on this tub.”
Nolan asked one of the Senegals to retrieve the ship’s original crew. Within a minute, the four Korean sailors were on the bridge. Though they’d stayed in the mess hall with Emma and the ninety-nine refugees during the previous two attacks, after viewing the aftermath of those battles, they were well aware what Alpha was capable of.
Yet, they were hardly soldiers, and when Nolan told them he thought the pirates were going to attack again, the Koreans became very nervous. Then Nolan asked them: Were there any other weapons aboard the ship? Anything at all?
The crew members settled down enough to think. Through hand signs and rough English they confirmed there were no guns aboard. Nothing along those lines.
But maybe …
The four men disappeared below deck, but within another minute, two were back. They were carrying a bucket filled with a thick red liquid.
Though it looked like blood, Nolan recognized it as hydraulic fluid.
The sailors explained that in one of their last bits of duty, on the day before the ship was due to be broken, they had drained all hydraulic pipes on board, simply to save the workers on the beach from doing the messy job. The fluid itself had been poured into empty diesel barrels; four were now located in the ship’s cargo hold.
But what good would this be?
“Make hot,” one of the crewmen said. “Dump on bandits. Burn skin…”
Nolan looked at Gunner, who just shrugged.
“Boil that stuff up and pour it on someone coming up a ladder?” he said. “Could be nasty.”
The other two Koreans arrived. They were carrying a box containing an array of kitchen knives, ranging in size from a dinner knife to a butcher’s cleaver to something that resembled a cutlass.
A chill went through everyone on the bridge. If a fight ever came to the point of using some of these things as weapons, then it really would be a battle for their lives.
Nolan started to thank the Korean sailors, but then each one took a couple long knives and put them in their belts.
Again through rough English one explained: “This is still our ship. This time, we will stand and fight with you.”
* * *
NOLAN DRAGGED HIMSELF to his feet and left the