It took a moment for Pitt’s words to hit. “Men?” Boland said flatly, as if trying to memorize it. “How can they attack from the surface? The Martha Ann has twenty feet of freeboard.”
“They’ll do it; you can be sure of that.”
“The hell they will,” Boland said harshly. He pounded his fist on the binnacle, snatched a microphone and Pitt could hear his voice echoing throughout the ship. “Lieutenant Riley; issue sidearms to the entire crew. We may have uninvited visitors.”
“It’ll take more than a few sidearms to turn back a horde that size,” Pitt said. “If they make it over the railings, there will be little fifteen men can do against two hundred.”
“Well stop them,” Boland said resolutely.
“You better be prepared to ditch the ship if the worst happens.”
“No,” Boland said calmly. “This decrepit-looking old gutbucket may not look like much, but she still belongs to the United States Navy. I’m not going to give her up without making somebody pay. Tell Admiral Hunter what happened here. Tell him...”
Tell him yourself. I’m not lifting that helicopter off this ship without you and your crew.”
Boland’s lips arched into a grim smile. “Good luck!”
“I’ll see you on the flight pad,” was all Pitt said.
Then he turned and passed through the door.
The pilot’s seat was damp and sticky as Pitt climbed onto its vinyl padding. He went through his preflight checklist as the mist tightened around the ship. The atmosphere was heavy and all light was muted. Nothing could be seen outside the ship; the sea was gone, the sky was gone, and only a tiny world of two hundred square feet was recognizable from the cockpit windows.
He engaged the auxiliary power unit and pushed the starter switch. The APU struggled and moaned in protest as its electrical output shoved the copter’s turbine into even faster revolutions until the exhaust temperature gauge and the whine from the exhaust pad notified him of a smooth start. Then the rotor gears meshed and the giant blades began slowly beating the misty air with their peculiar swishing sound.
When the needles of the gauges on the instrument panel settled in their normal operating positions, Pitt reached over to the copilot’s seat and picked up the towel-encased Mauser. He laid the gun in his lap and quickly unwrapped it, making certain the shoulder stock was attached securely. Then he shoved the fifty-shot clip into the receiver, climbed from the cockpit, and peered into the ghostly light. Nothing could be distinguished. The landing skid offered him some protection as he crouched on his heels and aimed the gun into the gloom.
Ninety seconds was all Pitt had to wait before two spectral forms materialized over the railing at the stern and drifted menacingly toward the vibrating helicopter. Pitt waited until he was certain they were not members of the Martha Ann’s crew. Then the Mauser spat.
The pair of seminude figures fell silently as their now familiar projectile guns dropped from their hands and clattered to the steel plates of the deck Pitt swung around and scanned a full three-hundred-sixty-degree circle before he briefly inspected the fallen men. They lay twisted and limp beside each other, their life oozing from their torn chests. The green-colored, almost nonexistent attire around their hips, and the weapons they’d carried, were identical to those he’d seen on the men he’d lolled on the Starbuck. The only difference his eyes could detect, a difference he hadn’t had time to notice before, was a small plastic box that seemed to be adhered to each man’s chest under their armpits.
Before he could study the corpses in more detail, his gaze was diverted by another figure that slowly rose over the handrail. Pitt pointed the gun and fanned the trigger with one gentle kiss of the finger. A short blast shattered the sound of the copter’s whirling blades for the second time, and the indistinct form suddenly vanished backward into the mist Cautiously Pitt crept over to the handrail. He was almost on top of what he was searching for when his hand brushed against it. It was a grappling hook, its six curved prongs covered under a thick sheathing of foam rubber, its length disappearing into the unseen water below.
It was now easy for him to see how these strange men from the sea, under concealment of the fog, had silently dispatched almost a hundred ships and thousands of their crewmen to the bottom of this godforsaken piece of the Pacific Ocean.
Pitt’s thoughts were interrupted by the heavy thunder of the .45 automatics, punctuated by the sharper crack of the .30-caliber carbines. Screams from wounded men reverberated the mist. Pitt felt remote and oddly detached from the fight that was growing in intensity.
A stray bullet whined past the helicopter and dropped far out into the water. “Damn you!” Pitt shouted. One bullet into a vital part would destroy the copter.
Three shapes that became men stumbled onto the flight pad, with glazed eyes and sweat trailing down their faces. “Cmon, don’t lag,” Pitt boomed. “Get a move on!” Pitt didn’t turn as he spoke; he kept his eyes peeled into the gloom. Nearly a full minute passed before another figure ran onto the flight pad. The young sailor’s panicky headlong dash was so rapid that he slipped on the wet deck and would have skidded between the railing bars and over the side but for Pitt’s strong grasp on a flailing arm.
“Take it easy!” Pitt admonished. “It’s a long swim home.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the seaman blurted. “You can’t see the bastards; they’re on you before you have a chance.”
Pitt pushed the young seaman under the haven of the helicopter as four more men appeared out of the gray film. One was the helmsman with Farris in tow. The sole survivor of the Starbuck was mentally disconnected from the battle going on around him. He looked straight through Pitt, his eyes wide and dull with abstract unconcern.
“Set him in the copilot’s seat and strap him in tight,” Pitt ordered the helmsman. Then he turned his attention toward the forward part of the ship. He cupped his left ear and listened, picking up heavy footsteps several feet beyond the unpenetrable haze.
“Pitt, you there?” a voice yelled.
“Keep coming,” Pitt shouted back. “No sudden moves!”
“No problem there,” said the voice. “I’m lugging a wounded man.”
Out of the fog came Lieutenant Harper, the engineering officer who weighed almost two hundred fifty pounds. Over his shoulder he carried a boy who could not have been more than nineteen years of age. The boy’s face was ashen, and a thick stream of blood ran down the length of his right leg, splattering in dark, maroon-colored drops to the deck. Pitt reached out and grasped a huge bicep, pulling the massive body attached to it onto the flight pad.
“How many more behind you?”