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back toward his vantage point, a small gap in the railing that allowed him to watch the pirate boats. He saw the one turn in against the ship and be flipped over by the ship’s wash. Men spilled into the water, men without life preservers.
    Below, on the fifth-deck gallery, between the lifeboats, Rosen caught glimpses of men connecting fire hoses to fixed, movable nozzles, nozzles aimed over the side. They tried to stay below the railing, out of sight of the pirates.
    Oh, man.
    *   *   *
    Mustafa’s skiff was a couple of knots faster than the Sultan. It was just enough to allow it to get closer and closer. The men fired long bursts at the bridge; glass cascaded from the windows, a little shower of shimmering reflections.
    Now the distance to the ship, less than a hundred yards, began to close quickly. The Sultan was turning into him! Faster than thought, Mustafa spun the wheel to bring his bow starboard … and the distance began to open.
    The machine gun kept burping short bursts. The men with the AKs hosed off whole magazines.
    Now the Sultan veered left; Mustafa saw her heel. He heard a scream on the radio. Then silence.
    One of the other boats gave him the news. Sultan had swamped another of the pirate skiffs, then had run over her.
    Sultan was steadying again. Mustafa veered in fearlessly to give the machine gunner a better target.
    “The masts. The antenna. Shoot them off,” he roared over the thunder of the engine and guns at Nuri on the machine gun. That was the plan, but in action men forgot things. The pirates with AKs never aimed them. They held them hip high and squirted. Even shooting from the hip in an open boat bucking the swells, the ship was too big to miss. The AKs merely scared people and broke windows, which was fine because scared people surrender quickly.
    His boat was about ten yards from Sultan when streams of water under intense pressure shot forth. Hard, narrow rivers of water. One of the streams hit the boat, and Mustafa went down. He hung on to the wheel as the stream of water went forward in the boat, threatening to swamp it and sweeping two men over the side.
    Mustafa veered away just in time.
    The engine still ran fine. Men were bailing like mad.
    One of the men had an RPG-7 launcher. He brought it to his shoulder, then waved at Mustafa, who cranked the wheel over and once again started in toward the ship.
    The third grenade did the trick. It burst the last of the movable nozzles and let water merely pour over the ship’s side.
    How much longer? Mustafa asked himself. The captain must be thinking of the passengers and crew—and, of course, his own life, the infidel dog.
    Better scare them some more. Mustafa saw Ahmad looking at him, a silent question. He had the rocket-propelled grenade launcher reloaded. Mustafa gestured toward the bridge.
    This RPG hit behind the bridge, went through a big window and made a nice bang. Glass and smoke blew out.
    *   *   *
    Buck Peterson kept the Sikorsky coming down. The pirates were shooting up the ship. They were not yet aboard. The ship was at flank speed.
    Now Buck saw the pirate boat on Sultan ’s starboard side. It was the closest, so he went for it. Began slowing his chopper, coming around so that he could fly between the boat and the ship. Fortunately that put his door-mounted gun on the side of the pirate boat.
    “Get ready, Wilsey. Fire a burst into the water short of their boat.”
    “Aye aye, sir,” Wilsey said, as if he had been asked to make coffee.
    That Wilsey was a good man, cool under pressure. Buck wished he had Wilsey’s kind of calm.
    He brought the Seahawk around and came up the wake, nearly over the ship. Heard the M-60 vomit out a burst, saw it turn the water to foam near a pirate boat.
    That ought to sober up the bastards.
    Buck Peterson was over the ship’s railing, amidships, with the pirate boat on his beam, when an RPG exploded inside the Seahawk. The explosion was unexpected, violent, and the chopper began