“Roger that.”
“Get to it, stay in contact.”
— | — | —
ChapteR 31
“OK, gang, no ditty bopping, no sight-seeing, we are just getting up the accommodation ladder, right to the bridge and back down. No below decks, no nothing. Damned Johnny Jihad may be all over this thing so be sharp and look alive,” Hoffman said as they bobbed in the small zodiac boat alongside the Ukrainian chicken boat. The freighter’s hull, when examined up close, was more rust and slime streaked with paint than the other way around.
Hoffman sent Myers, the 18-year-old seaman with a shotgun up the ladder first. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the first man in a tactical assault that is killed first; it is the second. With that in mind, he sent the Cook with an M16 up next. Clabber, the fireman, was third, and Hoffman brought up the rear, both with their SIG P229 pistols out.
One of the bread and butter missions of the Coast Guard was vessel boarding and, while touched on in basic training, most boarding team members took a special 9-day course where you learned a dozen drills for clearing the hatches, compartments, passageways and decks of most large ships, as well as handcuffing and other law enforcement skills. They practiced a few times a week while in port with plastic guns for safety, but mainly only had to board trawlers and a few passing oil tankers. Reefer ships, with their maze of blast-cooler holds and food cargo were not high priority targets and most teams did not fool with them. It was the first time Hoffman had been on one that was not tied up in port.
“Go, go up,” he ordered from the rear of the ladder. At the top on deck, the four-man team stayed close together, each covering a different section of space and superstructure above them.
“Cover this hatch over here on the starboard side, the starboard side over here,” Hoffman directed. Unlike the movies, most basic tactical teams did not do everything with a myriad of specialized hand signals. It was much easier when your heart is pumping and you are fixing to piss yourself just to tell someone what to do, than to remember the fine motor skills needed for swat sign language.
Hoffman radioed the
Fish Hawk
, “We’re on deck, nothing going on here. Nobody around. No sign of any sort of damage.”
“Aye, we have you in sight. You look clear on our end,” the Bosun radioed back from the cutter.
“We are going inside. Wait one,” Hoffman spoke into the mic and then nodded to Myers in front of the hatch going into the foc’sle of the ship. “Just like we drill, I open, you in, Clabber and the Cook follow, I bring up the rear.” He could see Myers sweating rivulets down his face in the cool morning breeze.
After everyone nodded in agreement, Hoffman reached out and undogged the hatch before swinging it open quickly and smoothly. The heavy watertight door creaked open on its rusty hinges and Myers bounded through it, bringing his shotgun up and to the right of the passageway along the bulkhead. The Cook went in and took the left hand side, covering with his M16. Clabber and Hoffman followed as they maneuvered their way into the vessel’s superstructure.
“Let’s get to that bridge and get the fuck out of here,” he said as they climbed the ladder to the next deck, weapons ready.
As they moved through the ship to the bridge, they dogged hatches behind them and stayed close together, almost touching each other the whole way. Hoffman gave a running radio monologue with the cutter since he knew they were out of sight of the
Fish Hawk
and her protective cover to keep them involved in the situation.
“This place smells like a sink at Waffle House,” said the Cook.
The inside of the ship reeked of diesel fuel, burned greasy food, and a faint sickly sweet aroma of long-rotted poultry. The ship was quiet as a tomb and her engines and generators were off, forcing the Coast Guard team to rely on the small Surefire flashlights on their weapons to stab through the dank wet passageways as they went. Myers with the shotgun would go first, backed up by the Cook with the M16, and Clabber keeping cover at the tail. When they would get to a corner, Hoffman would scoot up and peek around the corners while the shotgun kept cover.
Hoffman was hyper-aware of everything he passed and saw. One giant eyeball surrounded by a mustache in a blue coast guard uniform, taking everything in. Information plaques and plates in the crazy gibberish that was Cyrillic print fought for space with stenciled deck numbers and symbols in the international maritime language of codes and hieroglyphics on the hatches and bulkheads. Apparently, the Russian letter ‘3’ was the same as the English ‘Z’ because it was on every watertight hatch.
He passed by a pair of Nike’s tied to an overhead pipe. An abandoned man-purse lay on the deck. Bottle caps from a dozen different sodas from all over the world rested in corners. These things were all a welcome sight compared to what he was dreading to see. He just knew the inside of the ship would be shell casings, bullet holes, blood and gore, and yet they had seen none of this.
It was cool inside the ship but the Chief was pouring sweat. It ran into his eyes, he tasted it on the corners of his lips, it dripped down his back and into the crack of his hairy ass. Finally, they came to the door that should be the bridge. Sure enough, it had a black plastic sign on it that said MOTCNK, just like the Skipper said, only the N was backwards.
“Just like before, move,” Hoffman said as he popped the latch and snatched the watertight door open.
They flowed into the wheelhouse like a flood and fanned out. The ship’s furniture was 1960s style art deco mixed with Russian communist flavor from the 1980s. The captain’s chair was a bright orange, and looked as if it was modeled after Captain Kirk’s. In the chair, however, was not Shatner but a medium sized middle-aged man wearing a pair of cotton work pants and a cheap button-up shirt of the kind common in Eastern Europe.
“This guy doesn’t look too good, Chief,” the Cook, master of the understatement, said. Even from fifteen feet away they could see that the man in the captain’s chair had a neat hole about the size of a dime in his temple, his shirt covered in gore, and a heavy soviet-era Makarov pistol lay on the floor under his right hand. The pistol’s thick plastic grip was slimed with blood.
“Stick together and watch for threats, guys,” Hoffman said as he reached down and palmed the pistol, depositing it in the pocket of his float coat.
He looked around the bridge and noticed quickly a bound book several hundred pages long, filled with Cyrillic along with dates and times. He closed it and called to
Fish Hawk
.
“Got the deck log. It’s un-friggin’-readable unless you are Boris Bad-inoff, but we got it. Also got one DOA here on the bridge. Looks self-inflicted,” Hoffman called in.
“Anyone else, Chief? Any sign of infection?” Jarvis asked over the radio.
“Not so far. Looks like all the engines and gennys are shut down, and this thing is moored pretty well. All the hatches are closed. We are about ready to return to boat,” Hoffman replied.
“Got it. RTB,” came Jarvis.
The fact that there was no more crew was ominous. A typical deep-sea merchant ship has a crew of 20 or more sailors including a master, three mates, a chief engineer and three assistant engineers, plus six or more unlicensed seamen, plus able seamen, oilers, QMEDs, and cooks or food handlers. They were about 19 shy—counting the guy with the headache.
“Ok guys, let’s move out. There is nothing to see here,” the Chief said to the team as he handed the deck log over to the Cook and started motioning for the hatch. As they made their way out of the bridge, the way they came Hoffman brought up the rear. Just before he stepped over the rim of the watertight door, something caught his eye on the chart table in the corner of the bridge.
“Wait one,” he told Clabber in front of him who was standing in the passageway outside the wheelhouse.
Hoffman made his way back across the compartment and slung his shotgun over his shoulder as he reached out across the chart table’s top. Strewn across the table was a pair of glasses, a crossword puzzle, a half-eaten bag of hard candy, and two blue and white paper packets. The packets, with a map printed on the cover of them were about the size of an iPhone and read
Belomorkanal
across the label in red glossy letters. Hoffman picked up one and looked inside.
Twenty stiff Russian cigarettes, as big around as your uncle’s pinkie finger and about as appetizing, stood at attention inside the pack. Their thick cardboard filters were dark and industrial at the base of each one. Hoffman had burned them once before a few years ago, when the crew of a visiting Bulgarian bulk carrier had them over for dinner. They smelled like burning hair, but tobacco was tobacco and he smiled and shoved both packs in the side cargo pocket of his pants.
Under where the cigarettes had rested on the heavy chart table, he saw a thick white plastic instrumented box about the size of a walkie-talkie. It had an old school analog meter on it that looked up at him. Under the meter was a Russian word that looked like KRAPU. While this did not mean anything to Hoffman, the small dime-sized yellow and black radiation symbol on the bottom of the meter did. The fact that the meter was bouncing was just sinking in as he felt the teeth of the man with the bullet hole in his temple behind him penetrate down to the bone of his vertebra just above the back of the chief’s collar.
The last thought to flash through his brain was that he did not really want the damn cigarettes that bad anyway.
— | — | —
ChapteR 32
Jarvis sat at the table with his hands flat out in front of him. He wore his winter dress blue uniform complete with button down shirt, tie, and ribbons instead of his standard untucked UODU blues and baseball cap. The fact that he had a basic amount of kit aboard his cabin on the
Fish Hawk
had not left him homeless. He looked fresh, clean, and spotless. On the floor at his feet was a soft leather briefcase with an embossed USCG seal on it.
Reynolds could have cared less how the Coast Guard Lieutenant was dressed as she sat across from him still wearing her tattered and torn NOMEX flight suit. After living in the suit for two weeks, only updating her hygiene from a donated bag of supplies that included deodorant, a bar of almost pure lye soap and some baby shampoo, she asked herself why she had not joined the coast guard eighteen years ago instead.
“It sounds pretty open and shut, Lieutenant. Thank you for your report,” Reynolds said as she finished writing a note in her steno pad that she carried constantly now. It was amazing how fast she had been forced to go from an iPad and a smart phone to a 1970s-era radio and a sheet of paper.
“We did not recover Chief Hoffman’s body due to the security concerns on the Ukrainian freighter. I ordered what was left of the boarding crew to return to the
Fish Hawk
as fast as they could.”
“That’s understandable. I am sorry for your loss. We have all felt that pain during this operation unfortunately,” she said, all business. “What happened to the thing that attacked Chief Hoffman?”
“The boarding crew de-animated the Chief’s attacker, but did not encounter any other infected crewmembers.”
Reynolds nodded. She could tell the Chief’s death had affected him much more than he let on. Every officer relies on an experienced senior NCO to quietly save their ass and be the flipside of the good cop/bad cop act to keep the unit moving forward. You saw it in every service at every level. Reynolds had never served on a Coast Guard cutter but she was sure that the Chief was likely the most important member of the ship’s crew.
“I have done some joint tours with other services but I am kind of in the dark as far as the Coast Guard Lieutenant, so I will not pretend to tell you how to run your ship. However, as a word of professional advice I can only tell you to keep your crew busy so they don’t have too much time to dwell.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can your ship function with a man short?”
“By all means, as long as we have four crewmen we can put to sea; even with the Chief’s loss we still have eight counting myself. We are mission capable. Just need diesel in a bad way.”
“I’ll give you a requisition form so the Charter Boat Association guys will fill your ship. We have a decent stock of diesel left but are running out of oil and regular motor gas everywhere. Been a lot of looting apparently.”
“We will conserve what we get.”
“Do you think you can make it to Mobile, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, ma’am, once we top off, we can sail all the way to Mexico and back if we need too.”
“Good. Keep your crew together. Pull into port and let them have an off night. Then head up Mobile Bay to scout around. Do not make contact or land anywhere, just recon from sea, understood?”
“Yes, ma’am. What about the quarantine duty?”
“We’ve given that to the charter boat captains now. Many of them are boat-less due to the shortage of unleaded from what I understand. ‘The curse of big-assed outboard motors’, as Billy Harris describes it. Plus, they are looking for additional roles since Mr. Trung and his people came in last night.”