Page 8 of Soul on Fire
He kept his eyes on the leader, tracing him in his scope. There was something he didn’t like, something—
“GRENADE!” Schafer shouted. Two rounds exploded from his rifle, slamming into the pirate leader’s chest and followed by one to his head.
Not fast enough. The leader had pulled the grenade from somewhere, from his pants, from his armpit, from between his legs, it didn’t fucking matter anymore, he’d pulled it out and thrown it in one motion, no hesitation, and it was already sailing over the water before Schafer started firing.
It hit their RHIB with athunk, landing in the center of their deck and rolling. They all stared at it, and then up at each other.
Training said to kick it away, but too many seconds had already ticked by, they’d never reach it in time—
“Jump!” Elliot bellowed. “Out,now!”
Four SEALs hurled themselves overboard as the pirates grabbed their weapons and sprayed the ocean, waving their rifles back and forth and peppering the waves.
Bullets zipped by them beneath the waves, trailing lines of oil-lit flames dragged from the surface as their RHIB exploded. Fire on the surface spread quickly as their fuel ignited.
Elliot circled his fist and pointed down.Dive, swim deep.
He led his men down into the darker, cooler water and then under the pirate’s boat. They’d come up on the port side opposite of where their RHIB had just blown starboard. Every pirate was still slinging lead into the waves, desperate to take out one of the Americans.
They surfaced together silently, heads barely above the waves. “Check rifles,” Elliot whispered. “Bolts open.” When they came out, the water would drain. “Everyone okay?”
“I’m hit,” Ras said softly. “Got one in the thigh.” Red blood swam to the surface in lazy inkblots.
Not good. Too much blood if he could see it pooling on the surface, and the East African waters were teeming with sharks. They’d just rung the dinner bell.
“Highline, Midtown, what the hell is going on? What was that explosion?”
Elliot toggled the radio, cutting off Captain Watkins’s frequency. No time for that. “We’re boarding and taking their ship.”
“Hostile boarding, sir?” Schafer, Ras’s swim buddy, winked. He was helping Ras tread water, and beneath the surface, holding pressure on Ras’s thigh.
Elliot nodded. “Hostile boarding.”
Shoot to kill.
Jumper and Elliot came out of the water like demons, hauling over the side of the pirates’ boat and laying down fire, taking out every pirate who spun toward them with a rifle in their hands, shock plain on their faces. One screamed and ran at Jumper with a machete, but Jumper put him down hard. In seconds, all five pirates were down, nothing by bright red blood and spent casings soaking the deck.
Schafer helped Ras over the side, and they cut his BDUs to get at the bullet wound. A through and through in the meat of his thigh, but it was bleeding hard. Not enough to worry the femoral was severed; he’d be dead already. Still, it was probably nicked.
Their gear was soaked, but Schafer pulled out the medkit and slapped bandages soaked in salt water over the wound. Ras hissed and cursed, but helped Schafer wrap his thigh tight, as much pressure as they could without turning to a tourniquet.
“Cap’n is going to be pissed,” Jumper finally said. “She wanted captives, L-T.”
“Yeah, well, she wasn’t here. She didn’t get shot at.” Captain Watkins probably would have ordered them to back off and pull away. But that wasn’t Elliot’s mission. Letting pirates get away wasn’t what they were there for. “Let’s see what they’re smuggling.”
A dark opening led to the belowdecks, what was once a galley and a sitting area for entertaining now stripped bare and turned into a cargo hold. It was crammed with crates and duffels, each stenciled with a different identifier.
Elliot whistled. At first glance, those identifiers listed the contents as AK-47s, RPGs, grenades, and machetes. Cases of ammunition were stacked along the floor. Someone could start a war with this load.
“Aaaaghhhh!”
The scream came from behind him out of the darkness. A man, hidden in the darkness and out of sight, lunged. Elliot had two seconds to take in his wide, yellowed eyes and his qat-stained rotten teeth, and the shine of his knife flashing in the slanted sunlight falling into the hold.
He felt the knife strike, slam into the center of his chest. It hit his ballistics plate and shattered.
The man’s eyes shifted from victorious to confused, and then filled with fear as he held Elliot’s stare.
Elliot moved without thinking, grabbing his own knife and slamming it up into the man’s crotch, then shift and yank higher, grating his blade along the hip bone and severing the femoral artery before twisting and forcing the blade higher, though his belly, across the vena cava and the main artery, then into the stomach. The man’s eyes went wide, his entire body bleeding out, a flood of it all down Elliot’s front. He coughed, spewed blood on Elliot’s cheek and his shoulder.
