B003IKHEWG EBOK

by Mack Maloney

  He could now hear some of the men praying, their way of spending their last moments alive. Vandar was dealing with his last breaths in a different way. When he was captured, though the pirates had searched him, they’d missed a pen he always kept his pocket. It had a tiny light attached to it to help him write in the dark when the ship was training under blackout conditions.

  He was using this bare light now, and this pen, to write aimlessly on the compartment walls.

  THE STORM HIT just after 2 A.M.

  The sound of the water crashing against the hull rose in volume, and soon they could feel the Vidynut being tossed around like a toy. This only added to the misery of the sailors jammed into the small, hot space. Some began wailing again. Vandar ordered them to quiet down, to save air. In his heart, though, he was praying the hull’s composites would fail, and that the ship would break up in the tempest. A death by drowning would be preferable to suffocation in an airless space, inches away from a dead man.

  He was startled, then, when he heard furious pounding at the door of the compartment. It opened, and he could see three of the pirates standing in the dull light of the passageway.

  They began shouting: “Captain! Captain! Who is the captain?”

  Vandar froze for a moment. Why did they want him? Did this mean the killing was going to begin?

  The pirates cocked their guns and appeared ready to fire into the crowded compartment.

  “Who is the captain!” one yelled, aiming his weapon at those men clustered near the door. Finally Vandar called out: “I am.”

  Two of the armed men crawled into the space and dragged him out. Then they shut the door and locked it once again, sealing the rest of the crewmembers inside.

  The pirates dragged Vandar up to the main deck; the boat was swaying so much by now that they kept losing their grip on him. Vandar had gone through some big storms in his twenty-year career with the Indian Navy. Without even seeing it, he could tell this was one of the worst.

  They reached the main deck and the gunmen forced him up onto the bridge. Here, he found two of his sailors who hadn’t been taken below. One was at the helm—a young seaman who looked like he was about to die from fright. He had a bleeding, untended wound on his arm. The other, without much more experience, was watching over the ship’s vital systems. He, too, looked extremely frightened. He was bruised and bleeding, as if he’d been pistol-whipped.

  Outside, the storm was raging as if the vengeance of Vishnu had fallen upon them. The rain and wind were horrific and the waves looked as high as mountains. There were more than a dozen pirates on the bridge and they were all holding onto something, trying to stay upright as the ship was thrown all over the sea. One pirate, though, was away from the others; he was huddled in the far corner of the bridge, watching over something he’d apparently plugged into an electrical outlet.

  One of the pirates walked up to Vandar, coming nose to nose with him, even though the bridge was rocking mightily. This pirate was obviously the gang’s leader. He had an enormous scar running across his neck, as if he’d had his throat slit at one point. He had few teeth and a lazy eye, and he smelled awful.

  He also had a huge machete in one hand, and Vandar was terrified that this man was going to hack him to death right here.

  Instead, he addressed Vandar in rough, broken English.

  “Are we sinking?” he asked, his voice betraying a bit of urgency.

  Vandar was so thrown by the question, he asked him to repeat it.

  “Are we sinking!” the man roared at him, raising the machete.

  Vandar did a quick scan of the ship’s critical systems. He saw no red blinking lights, and no alarms were ringing. This meant, in theory at least, they weren’t in danger of going down. Not yet, anyway.

  But Vandar wasn’t going to tell the pirate that. “You must release my crew so we can sail this ship properly. If not, we will sink.”

  For this, he received the butt of the machete across his face. The blow sent him sprawling across the bridge.

  “We know this is robot boat!” the gang leader screamed at him. “It goes by itself. But in this? Can it go by itself in this?”

  “I don’t know,” Vandar told him truthfully, from the floor. The Vidynut had a small crew precisely because of its extensive automation, but it hadn’t yet passed its sea trials and had never gone through anything like the storm blowing outside.

  “You are the captain!” the pirate screamed at him, picking him up off the deck. “Either you tell me truth or we kill the lot of you right now.”

  Vandar collected himself and tried to appear calm, but it was impossible.

  “What do you want to know exactly?” he asked the gunman.

  “Are we sinking?” the pirate leader asked him again.

  Vandar replied, “No—not yet.”

  “Will we sink?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered.

  “How will we know if we are sinking?”

  Vandar indicated the main panel of status monitors.

  “If this lights up and starts making noise,” he told the pirate leader, “then it will mean we are sinking.”

  The gang leader hit him again with the machete handle—this time in the stomach. Then two other pirates picked him up and prepared to drag him back to the bottom of the boat.

  As this was happening, the pirate who had been sitting in the far corner of the bridge popped out of his seat.

  “It is charged!” he exclaimed.

  He walked over to the pirate leader and, in full view of Vandar, revealed what he’d been watching over. It was a battery for a video camera and it had been recharging, slowly as it turned out.

  But now the battery was full—and this was making the pirates very happy. One handed the pirate leader a video camera.

  The pirate leader turned back to Vandar and inserted the battery into the video camera like someone would put an ammo clip into a gun.

  “Soon,” he hissed at Vandar, “our show will begin.”

  Vandar was dragged back to the bottom deck and thrown back into the bilge station. He squeezed himself in, trying his best to stay away from where the dead bodies lay. Many of his men were wailing openly now, and he just didn’t have the heart to tell them to stop.

  Instead, he just returned to his corner and resumed writing his nonsense on the wall.

  He’d been out of Hell for less than five minutes.

  THE VIDYNUT SLOWLY sailed its way out of the storm by morning, riding out the last of the wind and surviving the final gigantic waves.

  The sky cleared, and the last stars of the night came into view. Off on the eastern horizon, the first rays of dawn were poking through the remaining wisps of the storm clouds.

  The pirates on the bridge all breathed a sigh of relief. The worst had passed. They could now proceed with their plan.

  The pirates had planned the taking of the Vidynut for months. They’d monitored the Indian Navy’s public Web site, where the admirals bragged about their new warship and its sea trials and how the revolutionary vessel would be available for foreign sales someday.

  This particular gang of pirates—the Swoomi Clan—had hijacked cargo ships off Africa before and had extracted million-dollar ransoms in return of vessels and crews. It sounded like a lot of money, but after dividing it up among the pirate hierarchy, their clan leaders, the Muslim radicals who provided them with the weapons and fuel, and the Eastern Europe an cartels that handled the negotiations, there wasn’t a lot left to go around.

  That’s when they’d hit on the idea of taking the Vidynut, knowing that for the same amount of work, and just a little more travel, they could hold the warship for tens of millions of dollars—with no middlemen looking for a cut.

  They had prepared very carefully for the takeover, attending to every detail, right down to how they would get rid of the crew. As a way of making their reputation, part of their plan was to videotape the crew’s execution and then release the tape to the jihadist media, where th
ey knew it would get widespread airplay and garner their gang a lot of respect.

  What they hadn’t anticipated was their video camera’s battery pack running out of power. Originally, they were going to execute the crew the night they took over the ship. But with no power for the video, the crew’s death sentence had to be postponed.

  But now, with the storm subsiding and the camera’s battery pack charged again, it was time to move to this next step.

  “Start bringing them up,” the gang leader told his men as soon as he detected those first rays of sunlight peeking over the horizon. “We’ll do them five at a time.”

  His men responded by pulling back the safeties on their AK-47s.

  But the top pirate held up his hand.

  “But we won’t waste bullets,” he said. He pulled his razor-sharp machete from his belt. “We’ll cut them to death instead.”

  THE SLOWLY RISING sun continued to burn its way through what remained of the storm clouds, making the new day hot and humid. A thick haze enveloped the surface of the water.

  The pirates went to the bottom of the boat and opened the bilge compartment. They dragged out five of the Indian crew-men and tied their hands behind their backs with duct tape. Forced up to the main deck, the terrified sailors found more pirates waiting for them. All were chewing qat and brandishing machetes.

  The Indian sailors were pushed to the mid deck next to the superstructure and made to kneel. Their heads were put on the deck railing and held down by the pirates’ feet. There was much chatter among the hijackers as the qat began to take effect. Some of the pirates were sharpening their knives; others were pushing and squabbling with each other as to who would take the first bloody swing.

  Finally, the pirates decided that the executioners would be selected based on seniority. The first victim, the sailor who was unlucky enough to be at the end of the group of five, was the ship’s cook. He was wailing uncontrollably; he knew what was coming.

  Two pirates readjusted his head on the railing, ripping his shirt back so his executioner would have a better view of his neck. The executioner laid his machete on the man’s nape and cut it slightly, giving him a mark to aim for.

  The executioner then let out a growl, raised the razor-sharp knife over his head, and started to bring it down—when the pirate commander screamed from the bridge.

  He stopped in mid-swing.

  “The camera is in the wrong position!” the leader yelled down to them. “The sunlight is going directly into the lens. We won’t be able to see a thing.”

  The pirates moved the small 8mm camera around to a handful of locations, arguing about the best place to film the beheadings. Meanwhile, the five Indian sailors were still being held in place, terrified by what was going on around them.

  Finally, all was ready again. The first victim was once again held down. The video camera began rolling. The victim began wailing again. The executioner raised his machete once again—and once again began to swing. But at that moment, the boat was hit by a rogue wave, a leftover from the storm. It was enough to knock the executioner off-balance. The machete came down—but it missed the man’s neck, slicing into his shoulder instead.

  The victim let out a horrifying scream as his blood started dripping onto the deck. The other pirates laughed and started taunting the executioner for his bad aim. The assassin spit out his wad of used qat; it disappeared into the low haze still surrounding the ship. He looked up at his commander, watching it all from the bridge of the ship, and grunted once more in determination.

  He raised the machete a third time and now swung it with anger. But again, halfway down, the ship was suddenly slammed by something much stronger than a rogue wave. This time the entire vessel shook from stem to stern, so much that it knocked all the pirates off their feet, the executioner included.

  The ship had hit something.

  Or more accurately, something had hit the ship.

  There was a monstrous screeching noise at the same time as the blow; the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal.

  All this occurred simultaneously, and it took a few moments for the pirates to realize what had happened: An old, rusty freighter had come out of nowhere and rammed the Indian warship so violently it had opened up a gaping hole on the aft starboard side.

  Before the pirates could react, this ship hit the Vidynut again, this time much harder, further opening the gash it had made. This collision was so severe, the Vidynut went over at least thirty degrees, almost capsizing.

  Several pirates were thrown into the water. Automated warning signals started going off all over the warship as it painfully righted itself. In the confusion, the five Indian sailors marked for execution were able to scramble away.

  All in a matter of seconds.

  The dumbfounded pirates thought this old freighter had simply struck the warship by accident. But when the freighter plowed into the Vidynut a third time, this collision more violent than the first two, they knew it was no accident. This third blow hit them with such force, the snout of the freighter was now stuck in the gash it had created on the side of the warship.

  The pirates panicked. None of this was making sense. That’s when they saw four people—an enormous white man and three Africans—aiming a large gun from the mid deck of the freighter back toward the rear of the Vidynut. These men fired this gun as if they were trying to hit the Vidynut’s propellers, but the angle was all wrong and the still-choppy seas caused the big gun to widely miss its mark. Its shell instead struck the ship’s stylish exhaust housing, blowing it to pieces.

  Those few pirates who weren’t in complete shock tried firing at the men on the freighter. They had anticipated some kind of a rescue attempt might be made on the Indian ship, but had been expecting helicopters or mighty naval ships from the United States or somewhere. It just did not compute that an old rusty ship like this would carry such a powerful gun.

  The men on the freighter ignored the pirates’ gunfire and loaded the gun again. They aimed it crudely, once more using nothing but raw muscle-power to move it farther down the deck, and fired again. But as before, the rolling seas and the bad angle prevented an accurate shot on the propellers. Their second shell took off the Vidynut’s entire main deck stern section with a massive explosion.

  And seconds later, a fire broke out on the next deck below.

  NOLAN WAS WATCHING all this while dangling from the top of the DUS-7’s forward starboard cargo mast.

  “I knew aiming that damn thing would be a problem,” he thought, swinging around to get a better view of Gunner and three of the Senegals as they struggled to move the two-ton artillery piece even farther down the deck. “It will be impossible to hit the propellers now.”

  He looked over at Crash, who was hanging from the next cargo mast over.

  “Stay cool!” he yelled over to him. “Wait for my signal.”

  “You got it!” Crash yelled back.

  Just how they made it here, and how they found the Vidynut in the middle of the vast ocean, in the middle of the massive storm, with not even the basic search coordinates, was almost inexplicable. Nolan was hardly a religious man, or a superstitious one. But after what had happened in the past few hours, he was considering becoming a little bit of both.

  They had spent a good part of the night caught in the middle of the typhoon. Not just high seas, not just waves crashing against the freighter’s battered hull: The decks were lit up by so many lightning flashes, the interior of the ship was bright as daytime. The winds had howled like a chorus of banshees. More times than anyone could count, the ship almost went over. They lost their GPS system and the radio. When both of the ship’s water pumps burnt out from overuse, the crew thought they’d met their end. Even the Senegals, with thousands of years of seafaring excellence in their DNA, grew nervous.

  At the height of the gale, Crash and Gunner, remembering their experience on the ground in Indonesia, fled to the ship’s galley and hastily made good-luck onion bags for every member of the
crew. They insisted everyone wear them around their necks, and no one turned them down. They also tacked onion bags all over the engine room, and spread sugar all over the bridge.

  At first, none of the mumbo jumbo appeared to do any good. The ship was lifted out of the water several times by waves that seemed impossibly high. The lightning grew even fiercer and more frequent. The wind took off their communications mast and even lifted their anchor chain, blowing it right off the deck.

  Then, at one point, all four of the cargo masts began glowing with the most fantastic light—as if the lightning that had hit them had also inhabited them. It was frightening and fascinating.

  St. Elmo’s Fire . . .

  That’s what the Senegals began shouting. Nolan had never seen anything like it. None of them had. At one point, it was so bright it seemed as if the entire ship was about to burst into flames.

  But then a gigantic wave hit the Dustboat head on and washed right over them. And when they emerged from the other side of the deluge, the mysterious light was gone. They soldiered on from that point, holding on tight, their onion bags swinging around their necks, and gradually the storm went away.

  And when the sun came up, not knowing where they were, or even what direction they were going, what did they see through the haze, not a mile away?

  The Vidynut. Still heading west.

  Nolan had never experienced anything like it.

  But miracle, good luck, or whatever, it meant their “simple” plan to recover the Indian warship had also gone up in smoke. Because by using their long-range night-vision scopes, they could see the executions of the Indian sailors were about to take place on the deck of the warship. They could actually see the machetes glistening in the early-morning sun.

  To the team’s credit, there was no discussion about it. No thoughts of payment versus humanity. On Nolan’s orders, the Senegals went to full double power, and in the only way they could think of disrupting what was sure to be a bloody slaughter, they T-boned the Vidynut going a full forty-two knots, knocking it back nearly twenty feet.

  This collision, and the second, even more violent one, probably would have been enough. It was not part of any plan to get stuck in the side of the warship. But that’s what happened when they hit the Vidynut the third time, melding them together like a pair of unlikely Siamese twins. Try as they might, the Senegals on the bridge just could not get the two ships to separate.