JET V - Legacy Read Free

precautions, ran ten hour shifts, leaving four hours every day where the watchmen were told to wake them if anything suspicious occurred. Sighting a slow-moving fishing boat didn’t really qualify as particularly alarming, but neither man was much liked by the crew – they kept to themselves and made a big show of toting around their rifles, the only guns on the ship.
    Commercial craft were historically banned from carrying weapons, but because of the spike in piracy off the eastern coast of Africa, a number of countries had changed their rules, which had introduced a new opportunity for enterprising security firms. Increasingly ships that routinely made the run hired gunmen to stave off hijacking attempts and to act as a defense against pirates, who were typically after easy targets, not gun battles; although lately, as an international naval presence had massed in an effort to curb piracy, reports had surfaced of more aggressive attacks where the pirates had engaged, using automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
    The mate grunted assent as he left the bridge to wake the guards. Salome was cutting along at eighteen knots, and the other boat chugging through the seas at scarcely half that, so he felt no particular urgency as he wound his way down the stairs to where the security men were slumbering.
    He roused the two sleeping gunmen with barely concealed delight and stood at their cabin door as they quickly pulled on clothes. Both donned Kevlar vests over their shirts and then scooped up their Kalashnikov AKM assault rifles before following him to the bridge.
    “What have we got?” Ari, the taller of the two, asked the watchman.
    “Doesn’t look like much.” He pointed to a bright spot on the glowing radar screen. “This guy, right here. No lights, on a heading that shouldn’t get much closer than a couple of miles. But I figured you’d want to know. Earning your keep and all. Maybe get to fire off those popguns.”
    Ari ignored the jibe. His job wasn’t to get into a pissing contest with the crew. This was just another boring gig, one of hundreds of voyages he’d made, where nothing had ever happened – almost disappointing, given the buildup the company had given him when he’d applied for the position. He’d had visions of exotic ports and clashes with pirates on the high seas, not a virtually endless supply of diesel fumes and seasickness.
    He looked at Barry, his partner, and grimaced.
    “Not a lot to get excited about. You want to stay awake for this? I’m going to go back and try to get some more sleep. At the snail’s pace they’re moving, it’ll be like watching ice melt…”
    “Sure. I agree. Won’t take two of us to keep an eye on the situation.”
    Ari shook his head and trudged back to the narrow stairwell that led to the main deck level, carefully ensuring that his gun barrel pointed down at all times. Another false alarm in a long string of them. Every time a ship saw anything other than another tanker these days in the waters around Somalia, it was a fire drill – but at this point in his two-year-long career it had been a wash.
    He had mixed feelings about that – some of the other men he worked with had been in firefights with pirates, and those had always ended with the attackers turning tail the second anyone shot back at them. They were opportunistic, extremely poor, and uninterested in doing battle to make their money, which was why the deterrent value of his company was undeniable. A few bursts across the bow of a pirate vessel and it would veer off in search of more benign prey. At least that’s what he’d been told, and he had no reason to doubt it.
    Up on the bridge, Barry set his rifle down and moved to the coffee pot, resigned to spending the last hour of darkness staring at the screen and trying to stay awake.
    ~ ~ ~
    Jiang Li , a thirty-year-old steel-hulled Chinese fishing trawler, had been hijacked three weeks earlier, and the crew held aboard as the