That seemed to break the back of the pirate horde. The ten or so survivors ran for the gangway just as the big diesel on the Kra bellowed out of idle. They ran into devastating fire from the superstructure. By holding back, Eddie’s men had fooled the pirates into thinking their avenue of escape was clear. Two dropped to the deck, their corpses skidding in their own blood.

The Kra began to pull away, abandoning their boarding party. Cabrillo stitched the trawler’s deck, but there were no targets. The lines securing the gangway to the fishing boat were still secure, so it was slowly torn from its mounts. Two pirates were halfway down it when the Kra began to move. The gangway stretched like a bridge from one ship to the other until the ropes on the Kra parted under the strain. The eighteen-hundred-pound set of stairs twisted, then pulled free from the Oregon, dumping the men into the sea, then crushing them when they surfaced.

The Kra changed angle slightly, narrowing the gap to give their men on the Oregon a chance to jump for it. Eric Stone at the helmsman’s station in the op center recognized the maneuver and turned the Oregon to port and gave her some speed just as the remaining pirates leapt for the rails. One landed on the Kra’s main winch. High above on the wing bridge, Cabrillo heard bones shatter and saw his body tumble to the trawler’s deck. A second gunman smashed into the Kra’s hull, fell into the water, and never resurfaced. The remaining six landed in the narrow space between the two ships.

Juan didn’t know if the helmsman on the fishing boat didn’t see what had happened or just didn’t care. He continued to turn into the Oregon. Eric Stone hit the bow thruster in an attempt to shove the Kra aside, but the prop’s athwartships tunnel was well forward of the trawler, and its powerful wash merely rippled the waves.

The two hulls came together in a grinding crash of steel, smearing the men struggling in the water, turning flesh and bone into a pink paste that washed away when the ships separated.

Juan fetched a walkie-talkie from a drawer at the back of the wheelhouse. “Wepps, Cabrillo. As soon as you have a sight picture, hole her at the waterline. Let the sons of bitches know they aren’t going anywhere.”

“Roger,” Mark Murphy replied.