Krysty tensed her lips in understanding. “Yes, they are easy to avoid,” she said, going to her knees behind the sandbags to reload. “Easy as going to hell.”
Ryan said nothing, the crosshairs of the scope flicking from sec man to captain, as he waited for his real target to present itself.
Chapter Nineteen
“What did they just put overboard?” Brandon asked, his once handsome face slashed with a dozen bleeding wounds. The outlanders would pay for the mutilation in ways even the lord baron didn’t like to use, except for kin turned traitors. They’d be starved until they willingly ate their own feces, and that would only be the beginning. They had scarred his face! Brandon would torture them forever, and never let them die. Under any circumstances.
“Who cares?” the pilot snarled. His right eye was gone, clear fluid oozing down his cheek, his hands a maze of shallow cuts that nearly obliterated his tattoo of rank. “Kill them all!”
In horror, Thor lowered the Weatherby scope. “Claymore!” he shouted, that being the only word he knew for a mine of any type.
Sticking his head around the wheelhouse, Brandon stared in the direction indicated. Floating on the surface were three small black-powder kegs, sizzling fuses sticking out of the lids.
“Fucking pitiful.” The officer laughed. “They must be out of ammo to try something this desperate.”
“Excellent,” the pilot muttered hatefully, throttling down the engine.
“Maintain speed,” the lieutenant snapped. “Just go around the things without letting them come close. When we reach PT 53, shoot for their legs. I want the bastards alive.”
“Yes, sir!” the pilot shouted, and PT 264 banked away from the floating bombs.
Contemptuously Thor drew a bead on the other boat with the Weatherby. “I’ll get rid of it,” he snarled, and fired. There was an explosion, wisps of smoke rising from the bubbling water.
The sergeant neatly eliminated the second charge when something hard ricocheted off the boiler of PT 264, and a moment later there came the rolling report of a longblaster.
“The bombs were a trick!” Brandon screamed, and grabbed for the wheel from the pilot. “Angle back! Don’t expose the boiler!”
But it was too late. Another slug hit the boiler, and the metal shell burst, a vent of live steam screaming across the deck, scalding most of the crew as it knocked them into the sea and boiling the rest alive. The noise was deafening, and Brandon pulled the pilot in front as a human shield in case of a full rupture. Slowly the steam eased down, exposing the partially cooked corpses littering the deck.
“Thor, do the same to their boiler!” Brandon roared, as the speed of their boat quickly dropped to nothing from lack of engine pressure.
Without a word, the sec man dropped his longblaster and slumped to the deck, a crimson stain spreading across his shirt from several pieces of twisted black metal jutting from his flesh. Furious, Brandon grabbed the Weatherby and started shooting wildly at the departing PT 53, but they were too far away, and even as he watched, the outlanders were piling sandbags around the vulnerable boiler.
“Nuking hell!” the lieutenant raged, spittle flying from his mouth, throwing the longblaster aside. “Pilot, fix that boiler and get our pressure back up, right fucking now!”
“Aye, sir,” the man said sullenly, a hot rage filling his mind over being used as a shield for the cowardly officer. First an eye, and now this. He would make sure that the limp-dick bastard got his some day. Soon.
Stumbling past the moaning sec men twitching feebly on the deck, the half-blind pilot went to the hot boiler to inspect the damage. “Split a seam, sir,” he reported. “Gotta let it cool more and patch her from the inside. Gonna take a couple of hours.”
“Bullshit! Get it fixed in thirty minutes, or I’ll remove the other eye!” Brandon stormed, then turned about looking over his wrecked gunboat. “Where’s Bosun Jarvers?”
“Got aced, sir,” a corporal said, holding a hand to a wound on his arm, blood trickling through his fingers.
“Then you’re the bosun. Launch the torpedo.”
“B-but we only got one left,” the new officer warned. “And those other guys are so far away already.”