Fireburst

There were no cars or any other form of motorized conveyance in sight. No music could be heard playing anywhere. There were no factory whistles, fire alarms, church bells, school bells or police sirens, only a deafening silence to go with the oppressive heat. The starving people shuffled along like an army of the damned heading back into Hell.

The town boasted a crude dockyard, the concrete pilings pitting under the salty spray. The workers were lean, but seemed almost fat in comparison to the people in town. Their clothing was a mixture of old and new, all of it clean, and they were heavily armed with multiple pistols, knives, machetes and well-oiled AK-47 assault rifles.

Using a plastic funnel, a tall man was carefully pouring gasoline into an engine bolted to a speedboat. “Is that enough, cousin?” he asked, stopping to straighten a kink in his sore back.

“More than enough,” the captain replied, screwing down the cap to the fuel tank. “With luck we should make a fine haul today. Our scouts along the coastline report that there is a yacht only fifty miles away.”

“A rich yacht full of fat men and their pale wives with big breasts?”

“There almost always is.” He grinned. “But more importantly they are secretly carrying the payroll for the French Foreign Legion.”

The tall man squinted. “How do you know such things?”

“That is why I am the captain and you pour the gas.”

“Fair enough.” The tall man laughed, displaying gold-capped teeth.

Sitting along the tattered edge of a street, a small crowd of people watched the pirates performing their chores in a mixture of wonder and raw envy.

Out in the harbor several container ships moved slowly along, their decks lined with armed men as protection from the local pirates. Off to the side was a shiny new warship from Saudi Arabia, located just on the other side of the harbor.

Much farther out a couple of European cruise ships skirted along the horizon, trying to keep the dismal villages lining the shore out of the sight of their vacationing passengers.

Only one ship was anchored in the bay, and there were no sailors in sight on the deck, nor any obvious defenses, such as barbed wire or Claymore mines attached to the hull.

“A fine ship, eh, cousin?” the tall man said, stroking his small beard.

“No, it is not,” the captain replied in a growl. “That is a ship of death.”

“Ah, the crew are good shots.”

“Worse.”

The tall man gasped. “They’re American?”

“Even worse than that,” the captain muttered, rubbing a fresh bandage hidden under his loose shirt. “Just keep moving, cousin, and keep breathing. There is no ship in our harbor. Understand?”

The tall man scowled at the bizarre statement, then slowly nodded in comprehension and went to check the manacles belowdecks. As the old saying went, a wise man knew when to be blind. There were just some things in the world that were too dangerous even to talk about, and, apparently, that ship was one of them. Then again…

“Would it really hurt if we did swing past the ship?” the tall man asked, the greed obvious in his voice. “A simple look, that’s all. What could that harm?”

“Hmm, I suppose so,” the captain replied, turning to glance at the vessel.

There was a distant boom, and a split second later the face of the captain erupted, teeth and eyes spraying out across the water.

The tall man had no time to cry out before his chest exploded. For a very brief instant, he felt himself falling backward, but never seemed to reach the water… .

* * *

A THOUSAND YARDS OFFSHORE, the guard on the stern deck of the ULCV Red Rose worked the arming bolt on his .50-caliber Barrett sniper rifle to chamber a fresh round. The empty six-inch brass shell hit the steel deck with a ring-a-ling noise, and rolled out a wash port in the gunwale to splash into the bay.

Normally, a sniper rifle would be a poor choice for a defensive weapon on a ship. But the Red Rose was no ordinary vessel, no matter how much it looked like one. The massive container ship was so broad and heavy that there was never any real sensation of being on the waves. Even when it was in motion, the ship felt oddly stationery.

“Alpha to Command. The danger is neutralized,” the guard whispered into his throat mike. “Area four secure.”

* * *

“COMMAND TO ALPHA, CONFIRM,” Lieutenant Naser replied into a gooseneck mike attached to a control board. “Continue your sweep, Alpha. Neutralize any possible threats at your discretion, over.”

The nearby walls were covered with monitors showing the real-time weather over every major city in the world, along with matching clocks and a glowing vector graphic of every telecommunication satellite in orbit.

“Alpha to Command. Roger. Over and out.”

“Trouble, Lieutenant?” Major Armanjani said, leaning over a table covered with maps. He had a ruler in one hand and a compass, in the other. A cold cup of coffee sat nearby, along with a plate of untouched sandwiches.

Prepared for a meeting later that day, the major was wearing an expensive business suit that cost more than he’d made in a month as a major in the Republican Guard. His necktie was raw silk, the stickpin solid platinum. A gold Rolex gleamed on a wrist, and an aluminum tube bearing the logo of a Montecristo cigar jutted from his breast pocket. Armanjani didn’t smoke, but the cigar was just the sort of tiny detail that made his public persona of wealthy man absolutely believable.

“Nothing of importance, sir,” Nasser replied, swiveling in the chair. “Some of the locals joked about taking this ship, so our rear sniper convinced them it was a bad idea.”

“Good riddance,” the major said, checking the wind patterns over Australia. “The village elders should have tried harder to teach them restraint.”

Raising an eyebrow at that, Nasser said nothing. What village elders? There was nobody in the entire city more than thirty years old!

In a desperate attempt to make money to buy food, the Somalian government had leased the rights for foreign powers to dump garbage offshore. Now, this area of the ocean was so heavily polluted the men didn’t even dare to go swimming out of fear of catching a deadly disease. The Somalians had fouled their own nest. It made the major angry to think that any Arab had acted so foolishly. The government tried to feed the poor, and end up killing more of them than starvation ever could have done. It was pitiful.

Then again, to be brutally honest, she noted, this huge ship lying anchored so close off the coastline must seem like an irresistible target.

Registered out of Edinburgh, Scotland, the Red Rose was a typical container ship, deliberately designed to not be noticeable in any way. The ship was a thousand feet long and capable of hauling 20,000 of the standard twenty-foot-wide, ten-foot-high, forty-foot-long shipping containers. To maximize their speed, the Red Rose was only carrying only half that amount, most of it legitimate cargo just in case they were ever stopped for an inspection. It was mostly home appliances, rice and farming equipment. Nobody sane would ever try to check 10,000 containers. That would take weeks!

However, past that outer layer were reinforced containers stuffed with BM-25 Hail multiple-rocket launchers. Designed to destroy land fortifications, the 122 mm rockets were more than capable of destroying any attacking enemy vessel, whether it was a jet fighter, battleship or submarine.

Next came a buffer zone of containers filled with ordinary sand, a bulwark able to withstand any bombardment for a short while. Past those, safely located deep inside the main hold, was the prefabricated command module made of six cargo containers welded together, which made it just barely large enough to hold all of the equipment necessary to operate the Scimitar of God, as the new weapon was called. There was a mainframe computer sealed behind a Plexiglas wall, a bank of control boards, a compact emergency generator, pressurized containers of oxygen and a few chairs.

In an emergency, the command module could be sealed airtight to sink to the bottom of the sea, far away from any battle raging on the surface, giving the people inside plenty of time to assemble a small submersible pod and quietly leave unnoticed.

Their trip to Somalia from the construction shacks in southern Peru had been harrowing, almost nerve-racking. Zigzagging across two oceans, the major had closely followed every storm possible, endlessly fine-tuning the Scimitar to new and even more deadly accuracy. They had destroyed islands, icebergs and a dozen assorted small craft along the way.

Just then, a polite knock sounded and a slim man appeared at the open hatchway. Professor Kazim Khandis was dark and handsome, with hair so black that it appeared to have blue highlights, and a small European-style mustache, meaning that he used no oils or wax.

“Yes, what is it?” Armanjani asked without looking up from his work.

“We should have Tokyo online in a few minutes,” Khandis announced in cultured tones.

“Excellent!” Armanjani said, putting aside a ruler. “Was there any trouble with the relay?”

“None whatsoever,” Khandis said, flashing a wide grin, then disappearing around the bulkhead once more.

Leaving the command module, Armanjani awkwardly stepped over to the next container. A scarred hand reached out of the shadows, and Hassan pulled the major across.