Ricardo slid the AKM from his shoulder. Pointing it at the ceiling, he pulled the trigger, letting off a short burst. Blam-blam-blam-blam-blam! Spotlights above shattered and shards of broken glass rained down on one side of the stage.
‘Great effect,’ an old man in the audience said with a smile.
‘You dummy!’ the woman next to him exclaimed. ‘This is for real!’
Maddie let out an alarmed cry, and Nan pulled her in close to comfort her.
‘Oh, yes, this is for real, señor,’ Ricardo said, looking smugly down at the old man. ‘We are El Tiburón Negro, the Black Shark, and we are demanding political change in Cuba. There are many of us on board this ship. Some of my comrades you will not see, but you can be sure they are watching you. Do not step out of line or the Black Shark will bite! Let me give another warning to you. If any one of you is found using a mobile telephone, you will be shot. No questions will be asked; you will be shot and your body dumped overboard to feed our brother sharks.’
There was not a single sound in the auditorium. Fear and tension were thick in the air.
‘If you do as I say,’ Ricardo continued, ‘no one will be hurt. I am going to call out groups of cabin numbers. When you hear your cabin number, you will leave this theatre and follow my amigos to your cabin. There, you will give my people your telephones and your wallets. You will open your cabin safe and give my people all your valuables. There will be no exceptions and no arguments. If you do not cooperate, you or someone you love will become shark bait. And so, let us begin.’
Ben looked down at Josh, Maddie and Nan. ‘Stay calm,’ he mouthed.
Nan nodded. Maddie returned her father’s gaze blank-faced, unable to really grasp what was going on. Josh looked up at his father and, despite the situation, smiled. Josh knew that if anyone in the world could get them out of this situation, it was his father.
Ricardo returned to the bridge with Captain Gustarv. There, the ship’s senior officers and bridge crew all stood with their hands clasped behind their heads while Ana-Maria, Consuela and Pedro stood guard over them.
In the absence of the gang leader and the captain, First Officer Wells had been wondering if there was a chance that he and other members on the bridge could overpower the trio. They certainly outnumbered them. Wells sensed that the youngest, Pedro, was nervous. He wasn’t sure about the older woman, though. She didn’t seem the criminal type and appeared out of character among the hijackers. The younger woman looked the hardest case of all. With a fierce gleam in her eyes, she kept her finger resting beside the trigger of her AK-47, and seemed like she would use the weapon without hesitation. Bullets spraying around the bridge could prove fatal for Wells and his colleagues, and that possibility had convinced the first officer not to try anything.
‘What do you propose to do with my ship now?’ Captain Gustarv asked.
‘You are going to turn onto a new course and proceed at twelve knots,’ Ricardo replied.
‘That is not so easy,’ Gustarv protested. ‘This ship is controlled by a navigation computer. The course and speed are locked in.’
Ricardo scowled. ‘I know that. Do I look like a fool to you?’ Using the butt of his AKM, he jabbed Gustarv in the side.
Letting out a howl of pain, the captain grasped his kidney region.
‘I also know,’ Ricardo continued, ‘that you can override the computer and put this ship into manual control.’ He had in fact read all this in a travel magazine sent to him in prison by Cousin Antony. The author of the article about the state-of-the-art new cruise ships of the Kaiser Line had had no idea that he was giving away vital information to potential hijackers. Ricardo looked around at the crew. His eyes came to rest on the stripes on First Officer Wells’ sleeve. ‘You, what is your rank?’
‘First officer,’ Wells replied begrudgingly.
‘Perfecto. You will override the computer and get us underway at twelve knots. At once!’ Wells didn’t move. Ricardo pointed his AKM at the helmsman, who began to shake with fear. ‘Do it or I will shoot this one.’
‘Do it, Wells,’ Captain Gustarv ordered. ‘Do as he says.’
Wells walked over to the control station. He pushed several buttons, then typed in instructions on a keyboard.
Ana-Maria looked out at the water on the port side. After a while, she said, ‘We are moving.’
Ricardo nodded. ‘Good. Now, once we have reached a speed of twelve knots, you will execute this course change.’ He nodded towards Consuela.
Consuela took a slip of paper from a pocket and held it out to Wells, who took it and read it. Wells frowned. ‘But this new course requires the Cleopatra to turn about.’
‘Just do it,’ Ricardo commanded, pressing the rifle to the helmsman’s forehead. ‘Or this man dies!’
‘Please, Mr Wells,’ the helmsman whimpered. ‘Do as he says.’
Major Alex Jinko, wearing the sandy-coloured beret of the SAS, and Captain Liberty Lee, sporting the sky-blue beret of the United Nations, were escorted into a US Navy briefing room at Norfolk, Virginia. A group of American admirals and generals who had been waiting for them returned their salutes.
‘Good to see you again, Captain Lee,’ said the US Army’s Major General William ‘T-Bone’ Hammer, deputy commander of SOCOM. He shook Liberty’s hand. ‘If memory serves me correctly, the last time we saw each other was in the Rose Garden at the White House, for the Presidential Unit Citation to GRRR.’
‘That is so, General,’ Liberty returned. She spoke very precise English, with the slightest touch of a Korean accent. She also spoke several other languages fluently. ‘And this is Major Alex Jinko,’ she went on, ‘a senior intelligence officer with Australia’s SAS Regiment. The major and I have worked together previously on GRRR missions.’
‘The Australian SAS? A fine, fine unit, if I may say so, Major,’ Hammer said, shaking Jinko by the hand. ‘How did you get here so quickly all the way from Down Under? I believe the SAS is based on Australia’s west coast.’
‘Yes, sir, the SAS Regiment is based at Campbell Barracks, at Swanbourne just outside Perth in Western Australia,’ Jinko replied. ‘But I’d been attending a US Army course at Fort Benning in Georgia. I grabbed the first flight here as soon as Captain Lee made contact and told me about the Cleopatra problem.’
‘Major Jinko is highly experienced at Special Operations coordination, General,’ Liberty explained. ‘He has coordinated several successful GRRR missions in the past. I would like him to coordinate this mission for us. He has the full confidence of the UN Secretary-General.’
‘Glad to have you aboard, Major,’ Hammer said, before he introduced the two new arrivals to the other big brass in the room, admirals from the US Navy and Coast Guard and generals from America’s army, air force and marine corps.
‘Tell us all you know about the Cleopatra situation, if you please, General,’ Liberty said once all the introductions had been completed.
‘From the top, the story goes like this.’ Hammer walked to a laptop on the long white table that ran most of the length of the room. ‘At 0530 hours, Eastern Time, this morning, the Coast Guard’s RCC in Miami picked up the following radio message.’ Tapping a computer key, he played the message aloud:
This is the Kaiser cruise ship Cleopatra, currently in the Western Caribbean. This ship, its passengers and its crew have been taken over by the Seventh Company of the Black Shark, defenders of the liberty of the Cuban people. Explosives have been planted throughout the ship and they will be detonated if anyone attempts to board the Cleopatra without our permission. Here are our demands. 1. The President and all ministers in the cabinet in the Communist government of Cuba must resign and step down within seventy-two hours; 2. Also within seventy-two hours, the sum of two hundred million American dollars must be paid into a designated bank account in the Cayman Islands. Meet these demands by the deadline, and the ship and its passengers will be released unharmed. Fail to meet these demands, and the ship will be sunk and many, many lives will
be lost. I will be in contact again to provide the details of how the money is to be paid. In the meantime, if any vessel or aircraft comes too close, it will be fired upon. Get to work, amigos! This is the Black Shark signing off, for now.’
‘Two hundred million dollars?’ Jinko marvelled. ‘I doubt even a cruise line as successful as Kaiser could come up with that sort of money within seventy-two hours.’
‘And the government of Cuba is certainly not stepping down,’ Liberty said. ‘A short time ago, as we were flying here, the Secretary-General spoke from New York City by telephone with the President of Cuba in Havana. The President told the Secretary-General that his government will never bend to the will of terrorists.’
‘What about the demand for the money?’ Hammer asked. ‘Would Cuba come up with that? Or part of it?’
Liberty shook her head. ‘The Cuban Government has told the Secretary-General that the ransom money is the problem of the cruise line and the countries of the passengers and crew on board the Cleopatra.’
‘Hells bells, Captain!’ Hammer exploded. ‘The Kaiser Line’s folks in Miami tell us there are people from something like seventy-six different countries aboard that ship! Americans, Brits, Australians, Canadians, French, Germans, Chinese – you name it! And the ship is owned by a Greek company. How does the Cuban president propose we coordinate a response from all those governments?’
‘That is why the Secretary-General has activated the GRRR team, sir,’ Liberty advised.
Hammer looked surprised. ‘The UN has received a formal request from one of the countries involved?’
‘It has.’
‘That’s the first I knew of it.’
‘The request for UN assistance has come from the government of the Bahamas,’ Liberty informed him.
‘The Bahamas? Want to tell me why?’
‘The Cleopatra is owned by a Greek company, but its ships are registered in the Bahamas for tax reasons. Technically, the Cleopatra is a Bahamian ship.’
‘And the Bahamas doesn’t have a navy or air force,’ Jinko added, ‘let alone an elite anti-terrorist unit like GRRR.’
‘Precisely,’ Liberty said. ‘That is why the Bahamian Government has asked for GRRR to be used to resolve this hijacking.’
‘So, the UN is stepping in over the heads of the US and UK governments?’ said a rankled Rear Admiral Cecil Bainbridge of the US Navy. ‘We possess perfectly good anti-terrorist people of our own, you know. There is no better unit in the world than the US Navy SEALs.’
‘The Secretary-General has spoken with the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Admiral,’ Liberty assured him. ‘Both have agreed that, considering the multinational nature of the crisis and the formal request to the UN by the Bahamas, the best way to resolve the problem is to use GRRR, with the most welcome support of the US military.’
‘And there are several American Special Forces operatives in the GRRR team, Admiral,’ Jinko added.
Bainbridge gave a dismissive wave of the hand. ‘Yeah, yeah, but GRRR is not American-controlled, is it? So, you’re telling me that you two are running this operation?’
‘Do you have a problem with that, Admiral?’ Liberty asked coolly.
‘A problem?’ he said, realising he had been out of line. ‘Just don’t screw up, is all.’
‘It is not our habit to screw up, Admiral,’ Liberty boldly returned. ‘That is why Major Jinko and myself are entrusted with such important tasks by the Secretary-General of the United Nations.’
‘I guess so.’ The admiral looked around at his colleagues, his face flushed with embarrassment.
‘And you got American Special Forces personnel and Australian SAS in GRRR, right?’ said US Marine Corps’ Major General Brandon Burch.
‘Yes, sir,’ Jinko replied. ‘There are normally three American and three Australian Special Forces men on the GRRR team. They’ve been working together for a while now. Believe me, they’re the best in the business.’
‘My marines would storm Hell if we had your SAS guys going in with us,’ Burch said passionately. He turned to Admiral Bainbridge. ‘I don’t have a problem with GRRR handling this. Do you?’
The admiral shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
General Hammer now stepped in. ‘Do you want to brief us on what you propose to do?’ he asked Liberty.
‘We will immediately use all intelligence communities at the UN’s disposal to commence a background check on this Black Shark organisation and its leaders. I personally have never heard of it.’
‘Neither have I,’ Jinko commented.
‘It may be a new terrorist group,’ Liberty said. ‘We will establish that soon enough. I will shortly summon the members of the Global Rapid Reaction Responders, to prepare to take the Cleopatra back from the hijackers. But first I need you to organise operational facilities for them, and for us, as close as practicable to the ship.’
‘Can do,’ Hammer returned.
Liberty nodded. ‘And I need SOCOM to commence immediate around-the-clock airborne surveillance of the Cleopatra, so we know where it is at all times.’
‘You got it,’ Hammer replied. ‘Whatever you need, you get – that’s direct from the White House.’ He shot Admiral Bainbridge a scolding look. ‘The President has every confidence in GRRR.’
‘Thank you, General,’ Liberty replied.
‘Anything else you need?’
‘A word with Major Jinko alone.’
‘You got it.’
Once Hammer, Bainbridge and the other generals and admirals had filed from the room, Liberty and Jinko sat down at the table.
‘I like the way you handled Bainbridge,’ Jinko said with a grin. He removed his beret and ran his fingers through his hair.
Liberty shrugged. ‘I have met many like him in my own country and in others. Some are prejudiced against me because I am a woman, some because I am Korean, some because I am only a captain and not a general. It is of no consequence. This female Korean captain was given a job to do by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and I intend to do it.’
‘And you do it well.’
Liberty Lee smiled. ‘Thank you, Major. So, I did not tell the generals and admirals this, but there is someone we know very well aboard the Cleopatra.’
Jinko looked at her in surprise. ‘Who?’
‘A GRRR member. Our very own Sergeant Fulton.’
‘You’re kidding! How did that happen?’
‘Sergeant Fulton was given two weeks’ medical leave after his last mission. He contacted me to see if I would approve of him taking his family on a cruise aboard the Cleopatra during his medical leave, and of course I agreed. I’ve tried calling Sergeant Fulton but there has been no answer. I suspect the hijackers have confiscated the passengers’ telephones.’
‘He wouldn’t have Caesar with him, would he?’ Major Jinko asked.
Captain Lee shook her head. ‘Caesar is in quarantine in Puerto Rico. But we will need an EDD on this mission. You heard the hijackers say that they have planted explosives throughout the ship.’
Jinko nodded soberly. ‘Caesar would be my first choice for this op, but he needs a handler to work with.’
‘Perhaps we can put him together with Sergeant Fulton once we get him aboard,’ Liberty said, thinking aloud.
Jinko’s eyes lit up as he remembered something. ‘Caesar worked with Charlie Grover while Charlie was recuperating after being wounded in Afghanistan,’ he said. ‘Maybe we could send Caesar in with Charlie.’
‘That makes sense. How do we get Caesar aboard?’
‘He can swim. He can be dropped by parachute. He can be winched down from a heelo. There are plenty of options. Caesar has even been inserted by submarine before. We can worry about the insertion details once we have the operational plan in place.’
Liberty nodded in agreement. ‘Should we add one or more additional members to the GRRR team in Sergeant Fulton’s absence? It is a very large ship for a small team to secure.’
Jinko shook his head. ‘The existing team is a well-oiled machine. The men in that team know each other, they know how the others think, how they will react in any given situation. Let’s not complicate things by bringing in new people at this late stage.’
‘Very well. Then let us begin.’ Taking out her mobile phone, Liberty prepared a text message for eleven recipients across the globe, instructing them to assemble in Miami within twenty-four hours. That instruction was preceded by the short, simple GRRR activation code: Rice for water. The Global Rapid Reaction Responders were once more summoned to action.
In the corridor outside his cabin aboard the Cleopatra, Ben stood with his arms stretched out to right and left. Behind him stood Nan, Josh and Maddie. Behind them were several hijackers with red bandanas on their heads and AKMs in their hands. Several more hijackers stood in front of them. One of these men was patting Ben down. When he came to the wallet in Ben’s back pocket and a mobile phone in a trouser pocket he took them out.
‘Gracias,’ the hijacker said with a smug smile. He tossed the phone into one garbage bag and the wallet in another. The phone joined scores of others confiscated by Ricardo Ramos’s gang.
Ben was pushed to his cabin door.
‘Teléfono?’ the hijacker said to Nan and the children.
‘Give them your phones,’ said Ben calmly.
Nan took her phone from her bag and handed it over. It also went into a plastic bag.
The hijacker clicked his fingers at Nan. ‘Credit cards,’ he said.
Fumbling in her bag, Nan brought out several credit cards, which the hijacker snatched from her and tossed into the garbage bag with the wallets. Then he looked at Josh and Maddie.
‘There’s no need to search the children,’ Ben said. ‘Josh, Maddie – give them your phones.’
‘But, Dad!’ Josh protested.
Ben scowled at him. ‘Do as I say, Josh. You don’t want them to hurt you or your sister.’
Operation Black Shark Page 9