Pirate Alley

by Stephen Coonts

  He watched on the flight deck monitor as the three Ospreys lifted off.

  Just in case, Toad had a destroyer going after the SEALs, too. Airplanes could develop mechanical problems or be shot down. There wasn’t much pirates could do to hurt a destroyer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the false half-light before dawn, Sultan of the Seas lay lifeless on the surface of the ocean, resembling nothing so much as a large dead whale. DIW, the sailors said, “dead in the water.” Her screws were still, and her dim emergency lighting barely outlined her superstructure amid the gloom.

  Ospreys with searchlights ablaze picked up the SEALs in the ocean, strung out along the course the ship had traveled. The nearest was almost a thousand yards from where the ship had drifted to a halt. USS Richard Ward, a destroyer with searchlights brilliantly lit, crept among the men being drawn from the sea in horse collars.

  “One casualty,” one of the Osprey pilots reported. “First Class Imboden. Dead when we pulled him out.”

  A few minutes later another Osprey reported, “Got a Lieutenant Cordova with a gunshot wound in the left calf. It’s bleeding, but the corpsman thinks he’ll make it okay. We’re inbound to the ship now.”

  “Roger. Switch to Tower.”

  Two mike clicks.

  On his monitor in Flag Ops, Admiral Tarkington watched the Osprey settle on the bow and four stretcher bearers run for it. In less than half a minute they were trotting toward the island carrying the stretcher with the man on it wrapped in a blanket.

  Dawn began to arrive. Fifteen minutes after the Osprey delivered Lieutenant Cordova, the Sultan was visible on the monitor as a ship, not just a collection of dim lights. She wasn’t moving.

  Colonel Max Zakhem delivered the news. “Mr. Cordova never got to the bridge. Bravo Team sabotaged the engine room control panel. One of the pirates started shooting passengers by the pool. Cordova thought any further attempt to gain the bridge would result in a bloodbath of the hostages.”

  The admiral merely nodded. Cordova was the man on the spot, and he made the best decision he could when he decided to get off the ship after the engineering control panel was sabotaged. All in all, Cordova and his men accomplished a lot. More than Tarkington expected, actually.

  “Draft a sitrep to everyone in the chain of command,” Toad said to his chief of staff, Flip Haducek. “Let me see it before you send it.”

  Haducek disappeared to prepare the situation report.

  Toad spoke to the flag ops officer, and a few minutes later was handed a radiotelephone. He put it to his ear and keyed the mike. “Sultan of the Seas, this is Chosin Reservoir on Guard, over.” Guard was the international emergency frequency, 121.5 megacycles.

  No answer.

  Toad tried one more time, got no answer and passed the instrument to Ops. “Call them once a minute.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  He used the Navy Red voice frequency to talk to Richard Ward’s captain.

  Five minutes later Ward crept up alongside Sultan, to about a hundred feet, making three knots, just enough to allow Ward to answer her helm. She stopped her engines and drifted to a halt alongside the cruise ship. Her deck was lined with armed marines. High in the superstructure, as high as they could get, snipers lying on their bellies focused their scopes on the pirates they could see. A quarter mile away on both sides Ospreys loaded with marines circled like vultures.

  Richard Ward played her searchlights on the deck of Sultan and on her rows of balcony windows. Faces appeared, people came out. A few waved. Most just stood looking.

  * * *

  Mustafa al-Said left the three passengers on the bridge with four of his men. One of them put a rifle to the head of a passenger and led him out onto the wing of the bridge so the crew of Richard Ward could see him. He merely stood there with his hostage.

  Mustafa marched Captain Arch Penney aft and down. “The engine room,” he ordered grimly.

  In the forward engine room two pirates were watching two engineers assess the damage. A dead pirate lay on the deck. He had bled a good bit before he died, and the red puddle was turning brown. It was also getting sticky where people had stepped in it. Still, no one touched the body.

  Ignoring the dead man as best he could, Penney inspected the electrical distribution bus that sent power to the four propeller pods. It was obliterated beyond repair. The diesels were idling, turning generators, but without electrical buses to distribute the power to the engine pods, Sultan was not going anywhere.

  “How long will it take to wire around these smashed buses?” Penney asked the chief engineer as he surveyed the damage. “Put power directly to the two aft pods?”

  “Five or six hours.” The man shrugged.

  The engineer straightened and wiped his hands on a waste rag. He never even looked at Mustafa. “We can try, sir. But it’s damaged, as you can see.”

  “Do your best, Derek,” Arch Penney said. He faced Mustafa. “Seen enough?”

  “So the ship cannot move?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Perhaps I shoot someone. Will it be able to move then?”

  “Not unless you can fix it yourself.”

  Mustafa pointed his rifle at one of the engineers and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore through the man’s neck; bloody tissue sprayed out his back. Down he went, probably dead, beside the body of a pirate. The body twitched, moving as muscles contracted involuntarily, and Arch Penney got a glimpse of the man’s eyes, full of fear. Then they relaxed and focused on infinity. He was dead.

  “You have two hours, Captain. Then I start shooting more people. I shoot someone every five minutes until the ship moves.”

  The fury welled up in Arch, rose like the tide. The dead man was Jerry Robinson, from New Zealand. He saw Jerry’s wife’s face in his mind’s eye, hysterical.

  Arch closed his eyes, tried to control his breathing. When he opened them, he focused on the chief engineer, who was fixated upon Jerry’s corpse. Arch reached for the man and turned him by pulling on his shoulder until he was facing the captain.

  “Wire the generators to one pod. Just one. We’ll move on that while you work on the second one.”

  The man’s eyes flicked to Mustafa, then back. He nodded.

  Arch Penney headed for the ladder leading out of the engineering spaces. Mustafa stood for a second, watching his back, then trailed after him.

  * * *

  Benny and Sarah Cohen stood at the door to their balcony looking at Richard Ward lying there in the gentle sea. Swells were negligible; there was essentially no wind. The gray warship seemed immobile, as if she were fixed to a pier.

  Beyond Ward they could see an Osprey circling. Even hear it.

  “We could jump,” Benny told his wife. “They would pick us up.”

  Sarah held tightly to his arm. They leaned out and looked at the people on the other balconies. Some were talking and pointing. Several were looking down at the water twenty-five feet below. It was a healthy drop. Hit the water wrong and you could break your back. Especially if you were over fifty, and most of them were.

  Sarah whispered, “Go if you want, Benny. I’m too old and can’t swim very well.”

  Benny pulled her to him. “We stay together,” he said.

  They heard a shout. A woman’s voice. A man plummeted toward the sea. He had a full head of gray hair. He went in feet first, then rose and started swimming.

  Above them a weapon chattered. As the Cohens watched, bullets began striking around the man. He kept swimming. The bullets impacted all around him, churning the water. He was fifteen feet away from the side of the ship, now twenty …

  Then a bullet hit him in the head and they saw a little cloud of red spray. The man ceased swimming and floated facedown. The pirate on the deck above them ceased firing.

  On Richard Ward a marine first lieutenant watching through binoculars made an instant decision. “Shoot him,” he snapped at the sniper lying at his feet.

  The sniper’s b
ullet went through the pirate’s chest and he collapsed on the deck. He was several decks above the Cohens, who didn’t see him fall or hear the shot.

  The Cohens heard a woman screaming.

  “It was that Texas oil dude, Warren Bass,” Benny Cohen said bitterly. He stepped back into the room with Sarah and pulled the French door closed.

  * * *

  When Mustafa al-Said returned to the bridge, prodding Captain Penney along with his gun barrel, he could hear a loud-hailer from the destroyer lying a mere thirty or forty yards away.

  “Throw your weapons into the sea and come out on deck with your hands up. If you do, you will not be harmed.” There were men on the bridge in uniforms, one of them holding a loud-hailer. Two men in khaki, two in some blue mottled coveralls. The warship’s bridge was a bit lower than that of the cruise ship, so Mustafa could only see the wing of it.

  One of the pirates who obviously understood some English had his gun pointed at the deck and was looking around nervously.

  Mustafa cuffed him across the mouth. “Bring one of the civilians. The woman.”

  The man did as he was told. Grabbed her and shoved her forward. Mustafa gestured with his head. The woman was shoved out onto the wing of the bridge. She grabbed the rail and sank to her knees.

  The destroyer accelerated away. The aft gun turret went past, then the stern. The wake was boiling white foam.

  “You should have surrendered,” Penney said as Mustafa shoved the woman into a corner out of the way, beside the others. “They’ll be back.”

  “For everyone’s sake, let us hope not,” Mustafa said and looked at his watch. “One hour and fifty minutes. You will decide who we shoot first.”

  The radio loudspeaker was squawking. “Sultan, this is Chosin Reservoir-”

  Mustafa al-Said fired a three-shot burst into the loudspeaker. In the profound silence that followed the burst Arch Penney could hear the spent cartridge cases tinkling as they bounced off the steel deck, which was stained with blood and human tissue.

  Arch could feel himself slipping gently away, letting go of this reality in favor of another, gentler one. He ground his teeth together, shook his head violently and forced himself back to the here and now.

  He had only a thread to hang on to, so he seized it. Somehow, someway, he was going to kill Mustafa al-Said, even if it was the very last thing he did upon this earth.

  * * *

  “Ah, Jake, come in. Come in, please.”

  The director, Mario Tomazic, nodded toward a chair, and Jake Grafton dropped into it. Although it was midmorning in Pirate Alley, it was three thirty in the morning in Washington. Only the night shift was left on duty. And the head dogs, who didn’t work shifts.

  Tomazic was of medium height, balding, but fit and trim, as befits a modern CEO or senior general. The newspapers said he was one of the leading experts in antiterrorism; Jake had seen nothing from Tomazic to prove or disprove that assertion. He had a nice smile and never raised his voice … and was absolutely ruthless.

  “What do you hear from Tarkington?” Grafton asked.

  “The Task Force 151 commander? You served with him?”

  Jake merely nodded.

  “It’s a fuckup. The SEALs stopped the ship. She’s DIW. Then the geniuses at the White House realized that the pirates had over eight hundred hostages, and would probably kill a bunch of them on general principles. They chickened out, got cold feet.”

  “So?”

  “So the cruise ship is DIW, the task force is on the scene, and the White House doesn’t have the guts to order a boarding.” Tomazic sighed. He hated civilians who meddled. Unfortunately, this was the age of meddlers.

  “What does Tarkington propose?”

  Tomazic sorted through a pile of messages and passed one to Jake. “You know that he wanted to do a show of force and rappel down marines. They are having a big debate over on Pennsylvania Avenue. I don’t think they’ll tell the admiral to stay away from the cruise ship or allow him to do anything. Those people have never had any experience with combat situations. They are going to have to look at it from every angle, think about political repercussions, get advice. In other words, they’re paralyzed.”

  “They liked the SEAL idea,” Grafton remarked.

  “Unconventional warfare, commandos, surprise, surgical violence,” Tomazic replied. “They thought it would make great television, sorta like a computer game. Military orgasm: the bad guys all fall down, the good guys win again. Ta-daaa.” Tomazic paused to clear his throat. “They’re idiots.”

  Grafton didn’t bother to reply.

  “They need more adult supervision over there than they’re getting,” Tomazic added.

  A smile tugged at Grafton’s lips.

  Mario Tomazic didn’t notice. He said, “The pirates will take the ship and hostages to Eyl. These are apparently Ragnar’s men. I want you to get your people to Eyl and wait for the green light to take out that son of a bitch.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want one less pirate in the world.”

  “We’ll give it a try,” Jake Grafton said, smiling. He liked Tomazic, who could dance between the cow pies with the best of them. Still, after all those years in the army, he knew when to lower his head and charge, and he had the guts to do it. Tough for the bad guys.

  Grafton thought about it for a bit, then said, “The government going to pay the ransom?”

  “Don’t have a demand yet.”

  “Oh, we’ll get one. Pirates are in it for the money.”

  “I don’t think the White House savants have thought that far ahead.”

  “Oh,” Jake Grafton said. “Well, when they get around to it, the money could be our ticket in. We motor right in with the cash, see the man. That would be Plan B. Plan A would of course be a sniper. Less risk to our guys.”

  “What would you need for a sniper hit?”

  “A drone over the city twenty-four/seven. Without a spotter on the ground, a drone would be the next best thing. A sniper will need a good setup location and some lead time, the more the better. And he’ll have to have an escape route. However, a sniper can only shoot when he has a target. A sniper isn’t going to get a shipload of people out of there if the money isn’t paid, either.”

  Tomazic eyed Grafton under his shaggy eyebrows. “So we have two problems.”

  “One relatively easy to solve, the other less so,” Grafton replied.

  The director sighed. “If we pay the ransom, presumably the pirates will release the ship, crew and passengers,” he said. “It’s good business. On the other hand, if the ransom is not going to be paid, we have to go forward as if it will be and rescue those people before the pirates realize what is going down.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Okay. Get the sniper thing going and give me a plan for rescuing the people if the politicians refuse to pay.”

  “Is that even a possibility?”

  “They’ll make the decision that they think will do them the most good politically. Whatever that is. They always do.”

  “Plans are just paper,” Jake said. “We’ll have to see how the cards fall.” He shrugged.

  “Just as long as the cards fall our way,” Tomazic retorted dryly. Like Grafton, he didn’t believe in fair play. Stacking the deck was not only legal in the intelligence business, it was the only way to play the game.

  “Do you really think the White House will give you a green light for a sniper hit?”

  “I’ll get one eventually,” Tomazic said grimly. “After the ship’s passengers and crew are ransomed, released or whatever, those people downtown are going to have an epiphany. They are going to want us to do something to solve the pirate problem in that corner of the world, or at least make it go away for a while, and they are going to want it done yesterday. When they come to Jesus, I want you and your men ready.”

  * * *

  Half a world away from Washington, Toad Tarkington was as frustrated as a man can get. Su
ltan of the Seas lay a mile away from his flagship, drifting on the glassy sea. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Surrounding her were gray warships, sprinkled here and there, moving slowly to conserve fuel and yet remain under control. Helicopters and Ospreys droned back and forth overhead, watching and filming and staying far enough away from Sultan to present no threat. Miles above an E-2 circled, watching every ship and plane within a two-hundred-mile radius.

  If he wanted them, carrier jets were armed and ready on the flight deck of an American carrier coming south from the Persian Gulf. They could be overhead within an hour. With every minute that passed, the carrier closed the range.

  Sometimes in the night when he was trying to sleep, Toad thought about the irony of keeping all these ships at sea, the sailors on watch, the airplanes flying, all to prevent pirates from grabbing an occasional merchant ship and demanding some money, a pittance really, compared to the cost of preventing the piracy in the first place. Maybe most crime is like that: It costs more to deter bank robbery and catch and punish bank robbers than they could ever steal. Yet we try to deter bank robbery and catch and punish the evildoers nonetheless.

  Toad wasn’t thinking about the irony now. He was sitting in his chair on the flag bridge listening to reports and reading messages from Washington, his fleet commander, and his theater commander. Messages poured in, and staffers read them and passed the ones they thought he should see on to him for perusal. Orders, advice, reminders, more orders, suggestions and general bullshit. Toad was used to it. He had been reading navy messages since he graduated from the Naval Academy, back before the glaciers melted and man discovered toilet paper. Back when there were iron men in wooden ships. Or wooden men in iron ships. Something like that, Toad knew. He was an old fart; all these youngsters standing around busily looking at the Sultan and trying to be respectful while thinking of ways to solve this military problem just reminded him of it.

  The fact that the problem was insoluble right now didn’t compute. Gotta work this thing, get it unscrewed, come up with a solution, make it happen. That’s what we’re here for. Dammit, people, this is the U. S. Navy we’re talking about.