Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(156)

Silva tensed. “Look. They’re makin’ their move.” Lawrence and his companion were walking to the mushroom vent, passing through busy Grik preparing the ship to get underway. The Khonashi acted like he was checking the vent, making sure the cover was secure, when he was really poking under it to check for mesh. Lawrence was sniffing around the edge, but then reached in the bag slung over his shoulder. A Grik Hij officer suddenly stopped in front of them, shouting something. Lawrence nodded, talking back, but the officer only got more agitated, gesturing at the bag. Lawrence, still nodding, pulled his hand out—with a pistol—and shot the Grik officer in the face.

“Crap! That’s done it!” Silva snapped, and fired. Two Grik fell together when the big, 450-grain bullet punched through one and killed another. Oolak fired too. Suddenly, Grik were taking cover behind the bulwarks, ignoring the saboteurs, thinking all the fire was coming from shore. Lawrence and his companion each seized a pair of grenades from the pouch, pulled the pins, and stuffed them under the lip of the vent. Then they ran. They made it all the way to the gangway before the apparent captain rose, shouting and pointing a pistol of his own, and shot the Khonashi in the back. He fell down between the ship and dock with a splash. Lawrence hesitated, looking back, then bolted. Silva had already reloaded, and raising Lawrence’s rifle, quickly shot the officer. The man tumbled back, but popped off five rounds as he went down. Lawrence stumbled but kept running.

The grenades went off. The top of the mushroom vent blew off and twirled high in the air like a huge, flying hubcap. The rest of the vent and a fair portion of the fo’c’sle deck followed in a spray of splinters. For an instant, that was it. Then a gout of flame roiled up from the gaping hole and pandemonium broke out. Grik sailors and a few Japanese surged for the gangway, but it quickly clogged and few could pass—particularly after Silva snatched his Thompson and stitched the packed sailors with a full twenty-round magazine. Flames raced up the tarred rigging of the foremast and caught the brailed-up sail. It didn’t matter. Every vent and seam was already spitting fire. Lawrence reached the burned-out gun pit, gasping, starting to limp, and sprawled down on top of them. That was when the surging flames must’ve found a magazine and the forward part of the ship was obliterated in an ear-shattering explosion. Oolak started to look, but Lawrence held him.

“Stay down!” he growled as debris began to fall. Silva rolled on his back and stared up, figuring if anything big enough to worry about landed on them, it wouldn’t matter if they were curled in a ball or not. An entire cannon and carriage crashed to earth just a dozen yards away. “Wuuaaah!” he said, and shuddered. “Wouldn’t o’ mattered at all.” He rolled over. “Where you hit, Larry?”

“In the hiph, here,” the Sa’aaran said, groping for the wound with the clawed fingers of his left hand.

“In the ass, you mean.” Silva snorted. “Lucky.”

“The other, not lucky,” Lawrence lamented.

“Nope.”

Silva pulled a field dressing from a pouch on his belt and tore it open. The new ones had a lacquered wooden tube of polta paste rolled up inside. He opened it, smeared it on the wound, then mashed the dressing on the bleeding hole. “Hold that,” he said, rising and looking at the ship. Amazingly, it was still afloat, the stern nearly intact. But the bow was just . . . gone, down to the waterline, and the whole thing was a roaring, crackling inferno. He sat back and took a chew.

“Hear that?” Lawrence said, stiffening.

Dennis shook his head. “I can’t hear nothin’, buddy.”

“I do. Is shooting . . !” He pointed back toward Kurokawa’s compound. “Lots shooting!” Oolak thought he’d heard some a few minutes before, while Lawrence and the other Khonashi neared the ship, but it lasted only a few seconds and most sounded like Blitzerbugs. There hadn’t been anything they could do at the moment, and figured whatever the girls and their guards ran into, they’d handled it. Apparently not—or they’d found more trouble.

“Wimmen,” Silva sighed, and glanced south. “How far you reckon Chackie’s an’ I’joorka’s guys are?” he asked. “I can’t hear shit.”

Oolak held up one finger, then two. “’Iles,” he said.

“Maybe a couple miles. Huh. An’ there might be Grik runnin’ back this way ahead of ’em.” He shrugged. “Well, I guess our little hootenanny ain’t quite over yet. I got a dooty ta’ finish, anyway. Can you move with that hole in your ass, Larry? Or do we have to leave you here?”

? ? ?

Savoie slammed ashore at six knots. The engines had been reversed, but just as it takes time to accelerate 25,000 tons to the eight knots she’d achieved, it also takes time to stop it—unless it meets something immeasurably larger and immovable. In this case it was the white sand on the gently sloping beach of Zanzibar. Even then, though Savoie slowed rapidly, she didn’t stop at once as her bow gouged into the sand and rode up toward shore. Few things can remain stationary on any moving object that rapidly quits doing so, and anyone without a handhold went sprawling. Guy wires supporting the aft funnel parted with a sound like cannon shots and whipping metal serpents, and the funnel tilted forward, crashing on the seaplane catapult in a swirling cloud of sparkling soot and smoke. But the sand was soft and loose and the bow had pushed to within a few dozen yards of dry land before it came to rest.