The Dark Side

Abruptly the port lookout began shouting and pointing at something a few points off the bow. A moment later, he was joined by an officer dressed in whites who carried his own pair of binoculars. The two of them intently studied whatever it was that had captured their imagination, and neither liked what they saw. The officer disappeared inside the bridge and I could just make out a flurry of activity in there. There were groups of officers apparently discussing something major at the top of their lungs.

The purser, a young and ambitious officer by the name of Emil Pedersen came on deck and approached us. "Please, sirs and madams, it is necessary that you go to your cabins now, quickly as you can," he told us in slightly accented English.

Emil was young and good-looking enough to have captured some initial interest from my teenaged daughters, but that faded when we found out all he could talk about was his lovely wife and baby boy back home. His deportment was correct at all times, as was the behavior of the entire contingent of ship's officers and crew, actually. He'd been seated at the same table as my daughters, Danielle, and I several times.

Now, he was clearly agitated and only just hanging on to his composure. I wondered what could so unnerve him and the rest of the crew on such a bright, clear morning.

"Emil," I said, getting his attention, "what is happening, my friend?"

He shot a quick glance up at the bridge and then back to me. Turning to present his back to the bridge officers, he told me in a low voice, "Pirates, mein herre ... pirates! They are coming."

Silly me. I thought pirates were something that existed in storybooks and history classes. I knew about the ragtag Somali pirates of some years ago, but that was half a world away.

"Please go below, sir," Emil continued. "You must go below."

One of the things I hate about mass transportation is that the people driving the thing, be it a bus, an aircraft, a ship, or whatever—none of them ever want to admit they're out of their depth in any crisis. An engine catches fire on a Boeing 737 and the captain comes on the intercom and remarks there is a slight difficulty ... please fasten your seat belt. Pirates attack, and all passengers must go to their cabins and don't get in the way. Great!

I wanted to go to my cabin actually, but only as a first stop. I'd brought my Glock on board, sneaking past the rather superficial security check with my daughters' help. The officer and two crewmen who'd been manning the checkpoint had been only too happy to help two young American teenage girls when one of their suitcases unexpectedly burst open. While the crew helped Evelyn stuff feminine clothing back into her luggage, I slipped past with the duffle bag with our pistols and ammo. My daughters had had a ball acting the part of two distressed girls, and I had a cache of weapons.

My daughters, Danielle, and I waited in my daughters' cabin—it was the largest—for more than an hour before my patience wore out. "I'm going to go find out what the ... is happening!" I ground out. I put my Glock behind my belt in back where the fall of my sportcoat would hide it and left the room to find someone in authority who knew something about what was going on. I shut the cabin door behind me and strode off down the corridor. I made three steps before it opened, then closed again.

I turned to see my two young daughters and Danielle exiting the cabin and striding along behind me. Megan was stuffing her 9mm inside her purse and Evelyn was dropping her .32 into a pocket in her slacks. Danielle didn't have a firearm, but she clearly wasn't going to remain in the cabin by herself.

We got lucky. The ship's Captain and a couple of his officers were already setting up in the passenger dining room, apparently to give the non-crew individuals a briefing of sorts. There was a blare of intercom noise, inviting all the passengers in several languages. As the four of us watched, our fellow passengers trooped into the big café area.

"My friends," the Captain began, "we have seen boats are coming to us with many pirates on them ... three boats of many pirates. They will be here ... eh ... soon, they will be here. They will take the ship, but not to worry, please. They will hold the ship for ransom and for all of us, also. So there is not something to worry about, please."

I was confused. The Captain was talking as if this was a done deal, and the pirates had yet to set foot onboard.

"How big are the pirate's boats?" I asked. "How many men on each of them? How are they armed—the boats and the men?"

"Ahhh ... thirty meters, perhaps little bit more, or maybe little less," he replied, looking at me a little owlishly. "Some of them have machine gun on the boat and everyone has pistol or rifle too," the Captain finished.

"So ... a machine gun or two, but no cannon?" I asked to pin him down.

"Not likely, mate," interrupted one of the oldest of the male passengers. "The shaells ahh too expenseeve and hahd t' foind."

I didn't speak Australian, but what he'd said sounded like the pirates wouldn't normally have access to large caliber naval weaponry. Personal arms, yes, but not cannons, and thirty-meter boats would look like toys next to the enormous bulk of the freighter.

"Then, why aren't we going to turn around and get the hell out of here ... or fight?" I asked the Captain. I thought it was a reasonable question.

"My sir," said the Captain with a pained expression on his face. "You cannot turn this wessel around like a motor car, and ... trod on the petrol ... pedal. It all takes much time, and if we run away, it will make the pirates very angry," he continued. "And if we try to fight with them, they will get very angry and peoples will get hurted," he finished. The look on his face said he'd been very patient with me, but now I should shut up and not make waves.

"Dammme, this is a proper cock up. So you blokes plan to do bugger all, is that it?" asked a sixty-odd year old gentleman with a florid face and a strong British accent. "Bloody wankers!" he muttered under his breath.

I heard a number of murmured agreements among the passengers. Looking around, and judging from the expressions on their faces, there wasn't exactly a unanimous agreement with the way the Captain saw things. The crewmembers present weren't on board with the Captain's plan either. Our friend, Emil, the purser, appeared about to explode. With a young wife at home, he wasn't happy with the prospect of being taken prisoner and eventually ransomed ... maybe.

"How 'bout we get this ship turned around and go back the way we came ... uh...," I began. I looked at Danielle. "What is 'right now'?

"Tout de suite!" she shot back.

"Let's get turned back and stomp on the go juice, tout suite!" I demanded. "If they take this ship, let's make them work for it, dammit!"

"Sir ... please ... we cannot fight them. We have no, how you say ... ah ... we have no weapons," the Captain remonstrated. "They will—"

"We have the ship!" I interjected. "This is a huge steel weapon," I explained. "I have seen the wake when we were under full power, and we are much ... taller than their little boats. They cannot come up our sides if we choose to not let them!"

"Sir, we have no weapons ... and they have the machine guns!"

I hauled out my Glock and showed it to their shocked amazement. "We have weapons," I retorted. But a .45 caliber semi-automatic is not a machine gun. He was right about that and what they had, or might have, outclassed anything I had available.

On the other hand ... fire was a weapon—a decidedly deadly one, in fact.

I'd had an idea. In one of my posts when I held the rank of Commander, the Detective Bureau came under my jurisdiction. One of the cases I became familiar with was an investigation into the sins of a certain young man who wanted to set fire to the house of a girl whose father made her stop seeing the young man.

The boy, instead of buying a box of matches, found instructions on how to mix homemade napalm from gasoline and ordinary soap. He wanted to stand back, throw his bomb against an outside wall and watch flames drip down the side. His only problem was he just had to talk about what he was going to do.

He boasted to a friend; he was overheard by a passerby he barely knew, and the passerby promptly called 911. For what he'd planned to do, and for other miscellaneous felonies, the guy was still in the Huntsville maximum security prison, serving a sentence of fifteen to twenty-five. I thought I could use his idea in the present circumstances though.

"We have Molotov cocktails!" I told the Captain, who looked perplexed. "We can throw bottles filled with gasoline with a fire wick down on them," I explained imperfectly.

It took a moment.

"By Jove," said the British gentleman from before, "spot on, that!"

Murmurs of agreement raced around the room, among the passengers at first but then crew members began chiming in. Remarkably, when the Captain saw what was happening, he decided to get out in front of it.

"Mr. Faaborg ... we have gasoline for the small boats in plenty?"

The emaciated man I knew to be the chief engineer nodded firmly.

"...And bottles?" the Captain required of the chief steward. I didn't speak Danish, so the Captain was told something I didn't understand, but it sounded positive. The nod that accompanied the report seemed to confirm that.

The Captain took a walkie-talkie from his belt and began to speak into the mouthpiece rapidly. We could all hear, and feel, the engine spooling up and shortly sensed the ship begin to change course.

The Bosun gathered all the crew in the room around him and began giving them detailed instructions. Their huddle began splintering as individual crew members raced out of the room to do the Bosun's bidding.

I wound up chatting with a group of passengers, telling them what I knew and making suggestions as to how we could each contribute to the common purpose of defending the ship, and ourselves. Shortly, we broke up also, assigning ourselves tasks to complete.

The Captain looked around for a moment, then left in a dignified saunter toward the bridge.

* * *

The ship began to alter course away from the three small ships visible only from the height of the bridge. Instead of simply reversing our direction of travel, the Captain elected to make knots for an Australian destroyer that answered the initial mayday call. The warship was headed our way as fast as they could move.

We were making a wide circle around the pirate vessels, but they would come up to us sooner or later, no matter which way we went. The pirates were faster than the freighter, but not incredibly so. It would take them a while to get alongside and attempt a boarding.

In the meantime, we worked hard to find a good Molotov cocktail recipe. The ship's WiFi worked quite well, and anything can be found on the Internet. My baby-faced Evelyn quickly found articles detailing the history, manufacture, and use of Molotov cocktails.

We weren't terribly interested in the past, but what we could use for the composition of more modern fire bombs in our situation was fascinating. We found information indicating a mixture of gasoline and shaved particles of soap worked better than the original WWII cocktail. The mixture was thicker, tended to adhere to the target, and burned hotter than hot. That was what we wanted; we set to work.

We had some time, but only a little. Working together, passengers and crewmembers shaved dozens of bars of soap into tiny slivers. We began experimenting with the percentages of soap to gasoline, and found a workable solution after a while. It might not have been the absolute best recipe, but it worked. That was all the time we had for research and development. It would have to be enough.

We trained ourselves and set about practicing. The Bosun had the crew organized already. Once he saw what I had in mind, he put them to work implementing the plan.

Throwing a wooden pallet off the bow on the side of the ship away from the oncoming pirate vessels was easy to do. As the "target" drifted down the length of the vessel, passengers and crew tried their luck hitting the floating bit of lumber. The idea was to smash a bottle filled with the fake napalm on the object so it would burn it to a crisp. Near the stern, a crewman with a hose from a damage control station drowned the fire with a fire-suppressing foam so it wouldn't be seen by the pirates.

Some people have better hand-to-eye coordination than others—it's just one of those undeniable facts of life. My daughter Megan was one of those people, as was Danielle. A disgruntled Evelyn was assigned the task of lighting the cloth wicks. The three of them, and a Filipino mess steward detailed to work with our group, outfitted themselves with thick gloves from the engineering compartment to minimize the risk of doing to themselves what we wanted to do to the pirates. I was the designated shooter. The five of us formed one team and there were enough volunteers among the passengers and crew to make up a total of six attack teams.

We found that scoring liquor bottles—they seemed to work best, for whatever reason—so that the bottle was predisposed to shatter along several lines on impact made our task that much easier. We determined the proper length of a cloth fuse, too. Finally, we figured out just how long the fuse should be aflame before throwing the bottle, erring on the side of "don't set yourself on fire, dummy."

We halted practice when the small pirate boats drew close enough to possibly detect what we were doing. They were still mostly hull down over the horizon, except from the bridge, but it made no sense to give them even the slightest warning. Besides, our people needed to rest.

While the fire bombers rested, some other volunteers practiced their marksmanship with an assortment of pistols. It turned out the ship did actually have a few firearms and the Captain finally had to admit it.

* * *

When the pirate vessels finally came in sight, I could see why the Captain hadn't relied on his radar to detect their approach. They were built of wood, sat awfully low in the water and had very little freeboard and ... there just wasn't that much to them. I was told the freighter didn't have military grade radar and I guessed small, non-metallic objects could get lost in the clutter.

We were really only concerned with the larger of the three boats—they weren't big enough to be called ships—coming at us. This one was slightly larger than the other two and appeared to have an old American M-2, a .50 caliber automatic weapon, mounted just in front of the deckhouse. The other two boats had nothing except lots of shouting, capering men with weapons in their hands. Apparently, our attempt to escape had enraged all of them. They were gesticulating rudely and jumping up and down in their fury. Maneuvering to get away just wasn't the way the game was played.

They came up to us on our starboard side in a column, then turned to match our course. One was up near our bow area, the biggest one was on our beam, and the last was one somewhere back close to the stern. They were all having difficulty closing up to our hull because of the wake our big freighter was making through the sea. It seemed to enrage the men on their decks even more. The middle vessel was the particular concern of my team and one other who were stationed a little forward of us.

If I'd been in charge of the pirates, I think I'd have sent one vessel around to our portside ... to divide our attention, if nothing else. They didn't though. I wasn't complaining. Doing it the way they did made our job that much easier.

As the center pirate vessel bumped against our hull, they let loose a long burst from the big machine gun, but it didn't seem to be aimed at anything in particular. Certainly, none of us laying flat on the ship's deck high above were in any danger; they couldn't even see us from down there.

At the second bump, I rose to my feet. My job was to use my .45 to deal with the gun crew and, if time and ammunition permitted, deal with the crew conning the vessel. I got a good sight picture right off the bat and began firing. The surprise on the boat down below was total. The big freighter was a steady platform, and the range was negligible. Both of the men at the makeshift gun mount went down quickly, and lay twitching.

"NOW!" I roared at my two "throwers." Danielle and Megan were already on their feet and ready to toss fire bombs down on the wooden decks of the pirate boat below us. At my signal, they stepped forward, holding the "cocktails" out to the side for the wicks to be lit by those designated for that duty.

I shifted my fire to the deckhouse and kept sending rounds down range. In a couple of seconds, the glass front of the deckhouse was starred and pitted with bullet holes. My last few rounds were fired into the mass of pirates on the deck, some of whom were recovering from the shock of our attack and beginning to raise their rifles.

Danielle and Megan threw their Molotov cocktails down, hard. Danielle's impacted on top of the M-2 and Megan's on the front of the deckhouse. The bottles shattered, spraying flaming napalm all around. After their throws, both of the women and I dropped to the deck and rolled quickly away from the edge of the deck until we were against the bulkhead to escape any return fire. I had long enough to see liquid flames spreading over the foredeck and deckhouse before I dove for cover.

We crawled forward about ten yards and, still concealed, we set ourselves up for another attack. The other fire bomb team working with us in the waist of the freighter had thrown their "cocktails" and then crawled even farther toward the bow.

I ejected my empty magazine and slapped in another one. I only had two spare mags. The florid British guy took the magazine I handed to him and began frantically stuffing ammunition from a box of cartridges into the magazine.

When I'd fired, it was a signal for the other people issued pistols from the ship's armory to also open fire. The other two assault groups—that's what we'd decided to call our mixed crew/passenger bomb throwers—had begun tossing Molotov cocktails down on the boats fore and aft of the center craft too. We could hear screams and shouts, along with a few gunshots, from those locations. The surprise had been almost total. The pirates hadn't even considered we'd actually fight back.

When Danielle, Megan, and I bobbed up again, I rose already in a shooter's stance and ready to open fire immediately.

"NOW!" I yelled. At the same time, I triggered off four rounds at the pirates who appeared to be most on the ball and able to shoot back at me or the two women. My job was to distract them this time, even if I didn't get any hits and I set to that job with a vengeance.

Megan and Danielle threw their bombs down on the little vessel and the glass bottle grenades exploded into sheets of flame and smoke. We dodged back to the bulkhead and moved toward the stern, passing where we'd initially been and going aft another fifteen yards or so.

We repeated what we'd done twice already. After that third attack, the little pirate ship was aflame from bow to stern.

Danielle made a mistake on her last throw. She'd almost lost one of her heat-resistant gloves and after yanking it back up her wrist and forearm, she remained standing after she'd thrown her flaming bottle, watching to see its effect.

"DANIELLE!" I bellowed, already moving. She was moving too slowly for my taste; I tackled her and drove her down to the deck, out of the line of fire. Rattled or not, and probably already in the process of dying, there were still men with weapons down there. Grabbing Danielle in my arms, I rolled hard toward the bulkhead and we both slammed into it as sporadic gunfire erupted anew from down below. I wound up atop her as we tumbled.