Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2) (47 page)

“On it,” Howell said, and Hughes heard the pump winding down almost before she finished speaking.

“Secure the pump. Close all the remote valves,” Hughes said.

“Roger that,” Howell said.

Hughes hung up as a red-faced Dan Gowan appeared in the door from the central stairway. “Damn! Getting up those stairs with this list is a bear. It’s enough to give you a heart—”

Gowan was interrupted by the strident buzz of an alarm from the inert gas panel. Both men made their way to the panel across the tilted deck, but Gowan arrived first and silenced the alarm.

“What the hell? We’re losing inert gas pressure on the cargo tanks. I’ll go below and check out the system.” He turned to go, but Hughes shook his head.

“It’s not the system. I bet the IG main is shot up, just like the cargo piping,” Hughes said. “The cons were using all the deck piping for cover, and we were unloading on them with everything we have. That piping is all mild steel, not armor plate. For that matter, we likely have holes in the main deck into cargo tanks as well. We’re probably losing the inert gas blanket to a hundred leaks.”

Gowan looked back at the panel. “We still have at least some positive pressure, but it’s falling fast, and we can’t patch the leaks until these assholes leave.” Gowan shrugged. “All we can do is keep the system running and hope for the best.”

Hughes nodded. “And everything on deck’s been sprayed with gasoline. Let’s get the fire pump going and wash down the deck with a fire hose from up here, at least as far as the stream will reach.”

Gowan nodded and started back down to the engine room while Hughes eased back down the sloping deck to the console to inform Georgia Howell of the plan. Before he called, he hesitated and looked out over the chaos of what had just a few hours before been the pristine deck of his ship.
God help us if they get men up on deck now
, he thought. A single muzzle flash could ignite a firestorm that didn’t bear thinking about.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

M/V
Tilly

Snag looked the abandoned towboat over carefully before motioning his own boat back alongside. The starboard side of the towboat was still burning, but the fire hadn’t yet engulfed the little deckhouse or spread to the port side of the boat. A pile of moisture-laden mooring lines smoldered on the stern, the water trapped in the fibers producing a loud hiss as the moisture flashed to steam and mixed with smoke from drier sections of the line now burning. The steam-smoke combination boiled from the pile to wreath the entire boat in a thick cloud of noxious and foul-smelling mist. The lines securing the boat to the barges were burned through, but as the late towboat captain predicted, they were no longer needed. The towboat’s propellers still churned the water, pinning the barges against the side of
Pecos Trader
as surely as if the captain was still at the helm.

Snag’s boat bumped against the port side of the towboat, and he and his henchmen scrambled aboard. A half dozen more boats awaited to disembark their convicts in turn as Snag barked orders.

“You two”—Snag pointed to two men—”y’all go to the engine room and the galley and round up anything glass or breakable with a screw top. It don’t matter what it is, just empty it out and bring the containers up on the barge.”

The men eyed the burning towboat unenthusiastically before giving reluctant nods and disappearing inside. Snag turned to the other men filing aboard, most lugging gas cans taken from other boats in their little flotilla. One carried a case of beer bottles.

“The rest of y’all haul those gas cans up the push knee and get on the barges. Spread out even behind the shields and start fillin’ those bottles,” Snag said.

The man with the bottles muttered something under his breath, and Snag moved across the deck in two strides and got in the man’s face. “You got something to say, Murphy?”

“I said I don’t see why we had to dump the beer. Fightin’ is thirsty work. That’s why I brung it. Besides, how do you know this is even going to work? That’s a big steel boat, and last I heard, steel don’t burn too good.”

“It’s a big steel boat fulla gasoline,” Snag said. “And if we can make a big enough fire, it’ll catch, one way or another. Now you gonna stand there and give me lip, or do what I told you? Or maybe you want me to get Spike on the radio and you can tell HIM it’s a dumb idea. I’m sure he’d love to hear it, seeing as how it’s his idea after all.”

Cowed, Murphy stared at the deck and shook his head. Snag shoved him forward and motioned for the other convicts to follow, then fell in behind them.

M/V
Pecos Trader

Port Bridge Wing

Hughes stood on the port bridge wing with Gowan, holding on to the wind dodger to steady themselves against the slope of the deck as they cast nervous glances toward the barges beside them. The napalm had burned itself out, but smoke still rose from the edges of the shields as the plywood behind them continued to smolder. More smoke rising from behind the barges indicated something on the towboat was still burning as well.

“At least we don’t have any more open flames close to us,” Gowan said.

“Thank God for that,” Hughes said. “A fire is about the last thing—”

“Ready, Captain,” said Georgia Howell, from near the wheelhouse door.

Hughes looked over to where Howell stood beside two seamen, holding a fire hose pointed over the top of the wind dodger and aimed at the main deck below. He nodded, and one of the seamen opened the combination nozzle, sending a powerful stream of water downward to smash violently against the steel deck. At Howell’s direction the men played the stream across the deck immediately in front of the deckhouse, starting on the high port side and sweeping the stream to starboard, flushing the accumulation of gasoline and used lube oil across the deck and over the side.

Howell turned back to Hughes. “I’m not sure how far we’ll be able to reach—”

They all looked forward as something clanged loudly on the deck, and a fireball bloomed near the port cargo manifold.

“What the hell …” Hughes turned back to Howell. “Georgia, get some water on that—”

A dozen more projectiles flew over the smoldering shields on the barge and smashed on the main deck. In seconds, the deck was a raging inferno as the Molotov cocktails ignited not only their own fuel but the gasoline not yet flushed away. Hughes hadn’t fully absorbed what was happening when fireworks erupted from the gaps between the barge shields into the labyrinth of piping along the centerline of the ship. Fiery projectiles ricocheted crazily in the complex maze before falling to the deck to continue to burn brightly, setting off even more gasoline fires, which raced across the ship to the starboard side.

“Flares!” Gowan said. “What’s next?”

His question was answered immediately as even more Molotov cocktails flew aboard, and another volley of flares danced their crazy dance in the piping. In less than fifteen seconds, the entire main deck of the
Pecos Trader
was a raging inferno. Hughes glanced up to the flying bridge and saw Torres and Alvarez with their sniper rifles, scanning for targets on the barge.

“CAN YOU TAKE THEM OUT?” Hughes called.

Torres shook his head. “THE SMOKE FROM THE SHIELDS IS TOO THICK. WE CAN’T EVEN SEE THE SALLY PORTS.”

Hughes turned back to see Georgia Howell pointing, directing the fire hose at various targets, but it was too little, too late. Hughes held on to the rail behind the wind dodger and made his way down the sloping deck.

“It’s no use, Georgia. Just concentrate on keeping the fire off of us. Get as many hoses as you can on the front of the deckhouse. Set them on spray, and tie them off to the rail up on the flying bridge to make a water curtain on the front of the house—”

Howell was shaking her head. “It’s better not to tie them off. If we keep people handling the hoses, they can make sure no hot spots develop.”

Hughes shook his head in turn. “Unless I miss my guess, our convict friends don’t have any intention of letting us stand in the open and fight the fire. There are still a lot of them out there in boats, and I suspect any minute they’re going to swarm and mass fire on the deckhouse to keep us all inside while it burns down around us. Rig the hoses to keep water on the front of the house unattended so nobody has to stand out here exposed.”

Howell nodded and started shouting orders as Hughes turned back to Dan Gowan.

“If you have anything left in your bag of tricks, now would be a good time to trot it out.”

Gowan shook his head. “I’m afraid the bag’s empty, Cap.”

***

Snag kept his boat under the overhang of the ship’s bow, where he could see down the starboard side without exposing himself. He motioned the boats with his lieutenants closer and went over the plan again. You couldn’t say things enough with this collection of morons.

“All right, Drake,” Snag said. “You got fifty guns. Y’all’s job is to shut down them machine gun and sniper rifles. Nothing else. Take ’em out if you can, but if you can’t, it don’t really matter. Mainly y’all just have to keep them off the rest of us. Keep your boats spread out so they can’t target you easy. You got that?”

Drake nodded, and Snag turned to the next boat.

“Hopkins, you and your boys shoot up their boats. Spike’s pissed, and he don’t want nobody coming off now, even if they decide to surrender. They’re all going to burn up right on that ship. Any questions?”

Hopkins shook his head, and Snag turned to the last boat.

“Nolan, you and your boys just shoot at anything that moves. Take out any other shooters and especially anybody who looks like they’re fighting the fire. Hopkins and his guys will join y’all after they take care of the boats.” Snag smiled. “Then we can all back off and wait for the bastards to fry. There ain’t need for anybody to be a hero here.”

M/V
Pecos Trader

Bridge

Hughes squatted with the others on the deck of the wheelhouse, well back from the doors and windows, trying to find a solution when he knew there wasn’t one. They lost three people before being driven back into the wheelhouse, and anyone so much as showing themselves in a window became a target for a dozen guns. He looked at Georgia Howell.

“The boats?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the high-velocity tank vent valves on the flaming deck outside.

She shook her head. “Both the lifeboats and the fast rescue boat were chewed up resting in their davits. It doesn’t take much concentrated fire to put a fiberglass boat out of business. We loaded the patrol boat on the stern, so it’s not as easy a target. It might be okay, but we’re sure not going to evacuate all these people with one boat and a couple of hundred convicts shooting at us.”

Hughes looked at Gowan. “How much time you think we have?”

Gowan shook his head. “The deck’s hotter than a firecracker, and the gas blanket on top of the cargo is expanding; that’s what’s poppin’ the vent valves. At this point, the pressure in the cargo tanks is so high the fans can’t push inert gas in, even if the IG main wasn’t shot full of holes. That’s the bad news. The good news is the inert gas is being replaced with expanding gasoline vapor but no oxygen, so the mixture in the tanks is probably too rich to support combustion. I think what’s burning is the vapor shooting out of all the bullet holes in the deck and piping.”

“How long, Dan?”

Gowan heaved a sigh. “Until the deck starts to fail and the pressure equalizes. Then oxygen will rush in and we’ll likely have the first in a series of explosions or at best an unstoppable fire. I’m thinking an hour, maybe less.”

Hughes nodded and was about to speak when the VHF squawked.

“
Pecos Trader
,
Pecos Trader
, this is Kinsey. How do you copy? Over.”

Sun Oil Dock

Neches River

Near Nederland, Texas

Spike McComb watched the flames and smoke boiling up from the deck of the
Pecos Trader
and smiled; it was about friggin’ time those morons did something right. He’d wanted to capture the ship, with all their stores and supplies, but that was an unknown payoff. He didn’t mind risking the meth heads, but his power was based on force, and he couldn’t afford to risk good soldiers. At least the troublemakers would be out of his hair now.

As he lowered the binoculars, something caught his eye downriver: a towboat pushing a couple of empty barges. What the hell? He raised the glasses again and saw not one towboat but two, both pushing empty barges and running side by side, as if racing. The name of the nearest was
Judy Ann
.

Spike watched, puzzled. The mystery was solved a heartbeat later when the Coast Guard patrol boat roared out from between the barges, followed by an armada of small craft bristling with armed men, all headed for the gap between the stern of the burning ship and the bank.

Spike cursed and reached for his radio.

Beside the M/V
Judy Ann

Neches River

Approaching
Pecos Trader

Andrew Cormier sat in the driver’s seat of the big airboat and looked over at Bertrand, who occupied the driver’s seat of a slightly smaller model running next to him. They’d ‘liberated’ the airboats from a swamp tour operation Bertrand knew about near Lake Charles, and there was plenty of gasoline available in the barges abandoned at the Calcasieu Lock.

Bertrand nodded. Cormier returned the nod and turned to look back over what Kinsey had jokingly called the ‘Cajun Navy.’ Over two dozen boats of various types moved along, hidden from sight between the barges. They were all very fast and carried heavily armed men, and a few women, from both the cypress swamps of the Atchafalya and the ranks of Lucius Wellesley’s towboat crews. People who made loyal friends and very bad enemies, and who in just one short day had come to view the term Cajun Navy with more than a little pride.