by Mack Maloney
On their next pass, Lynch and his wingman opened up with the F-18’s nose-mounted cannons. They tore up the back of the rusty old ship and blew the top off the freighter’s stack. They turned, and this time came in from the west. Opening up at 500 feet out, both planes walked a line of cannon fire right down the center of the vessel. There were a handful of secondary explosions this time, indications that there were weapons or explosives belowdecks of the old ship.
They turned again, knowing that fuel constraints and the coming darkness meant this had to be a killing pass.
But before they came in for this fateful strafing run, Lynch saw something odd happening on the ship. Someone had climbed up one of the freighter’s masts, someone who didn’t look like a Somali pirate. He looked more like a soldier, and he was madly waving a flag.
An American flag.
Lynch immediately broke off his strafing run; his wingman did, too.
“Pirate or not,” Lynch radioed his partner, “there’s no way I’m shooting at that. I just can’t.”
“Neither can I,” the wingman radioed back. “Someone might have got their wires crossed, because this didn’t seem right from the beginning. I think I just suddenly ran out of ammunition.”
“Roger that,” Lynch said. “Me, too.”
With that, the two fighters pulled up, turned as one and roared over the ship one more time. Then they disappeared into the approaching darkness to the northeast.
It took more than a minute for the roar of their engines to finally fade away.
DOWN ON THE DUS-7, the crew was laying flat out on the bridge deck amidships, the most structurally sound place on the boat. This is where Batman and Crash found them, hands over their heads, hot metal and smoke all around them. All except Nolan.
They’d landed the work copter just seconds after the F-18s departed and had immediately run forward.
“Jesus Christ!” Batman fumed, looking at the damage. “I probably know those Navy flyboys. And if I don’t, I’m going to find out who they are and fuck them up.”
The others were just getting to their feet. The Senegals were especially shaken up. They’d never had powerful jet fighters shoot at them before. Incredibly, no one was hurt.
Batman helped Gunner to his feet, then looked up at the mast and saw Nolan starting to climb down, stars and stripes in hand.
“Good thing he had a flag,” Gunner said to Batman.
Batman just shrugged. “Yeah—go figure that.”
It took a few minutes, but eventually everyone was back to breathing normally again. The damage report was not good, though. Some of their ammunition had gone off in the Rubber Room down below, and the deck was full of holes. The most extensive damage was in the engine room, though.
“They fucked up the feed system for the gas turbine,” Crash reported. “And we have a major leak in one of diesels. We got about half our electrical power functioning. But we don’t have any afterburner anymore.”
Batman just wiped his hands over his sweaty head. “Could have been worse, I guess,” he said to Nolan, who joined them on the bridge.
“Don’t speak too soon,” Nolan said.
He held up his arms and indicated the sea all around of them. Batman could see nothing but water.
In the confusion, Zeek’s ship had slipped away.
24
Calzino Island
The Seychelles
Midnight
EIGHT PEOPLE WERE inside Lazy Joe’s Bar: Four female college students from America, a bartender, a cook and two waiters.
Lazy Joe’s was one of three businesses—the others were a hotel and a scuba diving shop—jammed into a trio of small, brightly colored waterfront buildings. They were the only buildings on the tiny island of Calzino, the farthest-out atoll of the Seychelles chain, northeast of Madagascar. Just a mile long and a half-mile wide, Calzino was all but devoid of trees and vegetation. Its harbor, small and shallow, took up most of its eastern side. The nearest land, another Seychelles island called Mahe, was more than 100 miles away.
Scuba diving brought the tourists here. Some of the most exotic reefs on Earth were close by, reefs that resembled monstrous, multicolored globs of light emanating from the ocean floor. The best time to dive these bizarre reefs was at night.
The four girls at the bar were restless. They’d been drinking since early evening while their male friends were out diving for the fourth night in a row. After many Cosmos, the girls decided they were leaving the island the following morning, with or without their boyfriends.
Calzino was just too boring.
But that was about to change.
THE FIRST GUNMAN burst through the door at the stroke of midnight, waving his assault rifle around wildly. At first, the patrons thought he was a policeman. He wore a black military suit and boots and a woolen cap. But there were no police on Calzino. The place was too small.
Without a word, the gunman shot the bartender between the eyes, dispelling any notion that he was law enforcement. The four girls screamed. A moment later, the plate glass window next to the bar exploded and two more gunmen burst in, firing their weapons indiscriminately. The girls screamed again, louder this time. The gunmen quickly knocked them to the floor and held them there with their boot heels. More gunmen appeared; two walked into the kitchen and shot the cook. When one of the waiters went to the aid of the girls, he was dragged out to the street and shot. Other gunmen broke into the hotel next door, roused the two employees and shot them in their beds. The three people who worked at the Night Dive marina were beaten, and one was shot trying to escape.
The gunmen then stole all their victims’ wallets, emptied all the cash registers, collected all cell phones and seized the hotel’s satellite phone. And that was it.
In less than three minutes, the little island of Calzino had been taken over by Zeek and his murderous crew.
NO ONE ON the island had seen the Pasha enter the harbor. Smoking and battered, the battle-scarred 352 had slipped in and dropped anchor just a hundred feet offshore.
Yet despite their brutal efficiency in seizing the tiny town, Zeek and his men had big problems. The Pasha’s captain was dead, as were all his first officers, the only people experienced in sailing the ship. All of the vessel’s radios were destroyed, as was one of its two engines. The second engine was still working, but at only one-third power. Nearly all the electrical systems on board had short-circuited, all the navigation computers were down, and even simple things like the bilge pumps and the intercom were out of order.
Most critical, the pirates needed ammunition for their deck-mounted five-inch gun. Many of its shells had to be thrown overboard during the sea battle with their shadowy pursuers, when one of the fires threatened to blow up the ship’s ammunition locker. This left the Pasha with exactly two shells, both of which were loaded inside the gun.
Zeek’s new capo, Commander Fun Li, was extremely unhappy with this state of affairs. Yes, they had given their pursuers the slip. But the Pasha was barely afloat, and they’d lost more than three dozen men killed in the surprise attack. They’d made it here, to a safe harbor, but their most formidable weapon was practically useless. Li’s military training had taught him to make the best of bad situations, to seize opportunity from chaos. This is why he’d strongly suggested to Zeek that the pirate band take refuge here on Calzino in the first place. It would allow them time to regroup.
And good news came just minutes after they’d arrived. The ship’s engineers, all of whom had survived the sea attack, told Li that getting the ship’s working engine back to 100 percent power required only one part: a power transfer knuckle. If one could be had, they could fix the ailing engine sufficiently to get the ship to Somalia with minimal delay.
But how could they get a power transfer knuckle?
Li made a phone call. Using the hotel’s confiscated satellite phone, he spoke to a contact in South Africa who promised to airlift the critical part to Calzino immediately, along with a crate of five-inch
naval gun shells. The engineers assured Li that installation of the engine part would not be a problem. With any luck, the Pasha would be rearmed and on its way the following morning.
When Li reported all this to Zeek, who had hidden himself away in his large, luxurious cabin, the Pirate King took the news as confirmation that God was still with him, that he had left all the bad spirits back in Indonesia—another reason he wanted to get away from his homeland—and that his run of luck, from surviving the sea attack to finding this tiny sanctuary, was still holding.
Only then did Zeek go ashore to see the hostages his men had taken.
THE GIRLS ON the bar’s floor, still held at gunpoint, terrified and crying, gasped at the first sight of the fearsome Pirate king.
Striding in, dressed in brightly colored trousers, dress shirt and half coat, his beard in weird braids, his hair long and dirty, Zeek looked like something from a horror movie.
He scanned the shot-up bar, felt the veneer of the overly shellacked wooden tables, checked the overhanging aluminum lights for dust.
Then he casually pointed to the only brunette among the four girls and walked out. Two pirates yanked her to her feet and carried her, kicking and screaming, out the door.
The remaining girls could do nothing but cry as their friend was taken away.
THE TOP FLOOR of Calzino’s three-story hotel held a penthouse of sorts. Slightly larger than the rest of the rooms, it had a massive waterbed, a hot tub and a small bar. The wall over the waterbed was adorned with the steering wheel of an old wooden ship; some very old spear guns and a diving helmet decorated the bathroom. When the room’s curtains were opened, a large picture window provided an impressive view of the island’s harbor and the ocean beyond.
This is where Zeek and the pirates brought the girl.
Zeek forced her to sit on the edge of the waterbed while his men ransacked the bar. They found only small bottles of white wine. Zeek drank one bottle in a single gulp, then had his men force the girl to drink six bottles, one right after another. She fought them mightily, but it made no difference. Her resistance only amused them.
On at a curt nod from Zeek, the other pirates left the room, closing the door tight and taking up stations in the hall outside. As soon as they left, the girl began to scream, then sounds of a great struggle could be heard. Eventually these sounds were replaced by the girl’s pleas, begging Zeek to stop, and finally, by her sobs.
Then suddenly, the noise stopped completely.
The suite door opened and the young girl was flung out, landing hard on the hallway floor. She was naked, her face and chest covered with welts. She vomited, tried to get to her feet, and fell again.
One pirate slipped into the room. It looked as if a cyclone had gone through the place. Zeek lay on the bed, looking like someone who’d just finished a huge meal. The room smelled of blood and sex.
Zeek pointed to the curtains drawn across the room’s picture window next to the bed.
“Open them,” he ordered the pirate. “Then clean this place up.”
His man complied, drawing back the curtains, revealing the view of the harbor and the ocean beyond.
The man took one look out at the water, though, and softly swore: “Damn . . .”
Lying just outside the harbor, silhouetted by the light of the full moon, was the DUS-7.
COMMANDER LI HAD spotted the rusty freighter seconds earlier.
He was standing on the wrecked bridge of the Pasha, hoping to get its computers working again, when the splintered masts of the DUS-7 appeared above the jetty leading into Calzino’s harbor.
Li was both fascinated and highly troubled by the ship’s sudden appearance.
“They made it, too?” he thought.
The last Li had seen of the rusty freighter, it was getting shot to pieces by two fighter jets. He knew the heavily armed freighter probably belonged to the merc unit Kilos Shipping had sent after Zeek, just as he knew the jets belonged to the U.S. Navy. So, he’d assumed it was a case of mistaken identity and that the pilots mistook their adversaries for pirates. So intense was this attack, though, the freighter seemed doomed to sink, just as the Pasha had seemed doomed just seconds before. Yet somehow, it also had survived.
Studying the freighter through his night-vision glasses now, Li could see that, like the Pasha, the freighter was extensively damaged. Two of its cargo masts were missing; its bridge was in shambles. Lockers, ropes, chains, housings, the typical things that cluttered a ship of this type, were all gone from the deck. It was obvious that whatever wasn’t bolted down or working the freighter’s crew had been thrown overboard. This told Li the ship’s engines were also in bad shape, and that its crew had tried to lighten the vessel to keep it afloat and moving.
But how had their pursuers tracked them here?
Li again used the hotel’s sat phone, this time to call a contact in the Indonesian Navy. He had a question for him: Did Indonesian Navy ships have AIS on them—as in an automatic identification system? The answer was yes, all Indonesian Navy ships had the chip-in-the-ship beacon. Question two: Had Prince Seeodek thought to remove his AIS beacon when he took delivery of the 352 minesweeper?
The answer was no.
Li was so furious he nearly threw the sat phone into the harbor. End of mystery—the freighter’s crew had tracked them here via satellite.
Li called over two ship’s engineers and ordered them to find the AIS beacon wherever it was on the Pasha and destroy it. Then he went back to studying the battered old freighter.
Thanks to his contacts in the Chinese intelligence services, Li knew a good deal about the people he believes were on the ship. Nolan, Graves, Kapula, Lapook and Stacks. He knew their lineage—from their glory days in Delta Force to their fall from grace within the U.S. black ops community, to their sudden emergence as the darlings of maritime security. He knew all about their battles, their gigs, where they’d been and what they’d been up to in the past month or so, even how much money they’d made. Li had done his homework on the “Whiskey Team” before leaving Indonesia, knowing that Zeek might run into them again. And rusty ship or not, he recognized them as dangerous adversaries.
But he refused to believe the freighter’s crew was double-lucky blessed, as some people back in Indonesia claimed. That they’d become ghosts on a ship called the Global Warrior, which allowed them to kill with ease a pirate crew run by Zeek’s late brother. Or that they were able to spread so much bad luck on Zeek himself they’d caused him to go broke overnight. Nor did he believe the tale that, after fighting a typhoon while trying to catch up to the INS Vidynut, the freighter—which should have been a half an ocean away—wound up just a mile behind the hijacked Indian ship at the precise moment it needed to be there.
No—no one was that blessed.
True, they had come within a half-minute of sinking the Pasha and killing them all. But that bid had been foiled by their own countrymen shooting at them. How unlucky was that?
And finding them here at Calzino? Again, not some black magic. They’d simply had some earthly help called an AIS computer chip.
Yes, Li had studied them and tried to learn as much as he could about them. Just as he knew these people and knew what they had done, he also knew—as maybe the Whiskey Team didn’t—that luck was like something you could pour out of a bottle. Each person had only so much of it, and at some point, it simply ran dry. And that’s what was going to happen to these cowboys now. They were running out of luck. Li could just feel it.
The Pasha’s junior bridge officer now served as the battered ship’s commander. Li ordered him to immediately reposition the ship so it was sitting in the center of the harbor, just twenty-five feet off the beach. This took several minutes, and when it was done, the Pasha was blocking most of the sight-line from the harbor entrance to the small town itself.
In other words, it was in the way.
Now Li took a monstrous gamble. He ordered the Pasha’s weapons crew to man the forward-mounted five-
inch gun and had another crew member turn on the ship’s battery-powered searchlight and point it directly at the recently arrived freighter.
Then Li took the ship’s bullhorn, positioned himself on the stern of his ship, and addressed the newcomers in perfect English.
He informed them that the pirates had taken over the town, had severed all communications, and were holding hostages, including four American females. They would kill them all if the Whiskey Team took any action against them. Zeek expected to leave the harbor at a time of his choosing with no interference from the team.
At that point, Li ordered his gun crew to fire a shell over the top of the freighter. Poorly aimed, the shell nevertheless sailed over the rusty ship, passing through the empty air where, had they not been destroyed, the cargo masts would have been.
Li watched now through his night-vision goggles as the people on the freighter scrambled to what for them must have been battle stations, one man each on bridge-mounted 50-caliber machine guns, one man back to the ship’s tiny work copter. Two more manned the enormous howitzer these crazy people had somehow installed on the bow of their ship.
They also moved the freighter back from the harbor’s entrance and behind the north side jetty, making it less of a target for the Pasha’s deck gun.
The pirate ship’s gun crew stayed on station, but only fired that one shot. They had just a single shell left, and Li wasn’t going to waste it.
Now it was time for Li to put himself into the mind of his enemy. The M198 was a powerful weapon—almost too powerful for this situation. If the freighter crew fired it at the Pasha, one shot might sink the 352 in seconds. But, because the freighter was rolling in moderate seas beyond the jetty, Li thought it almost impossible that its crew could get an accurate shot at him. And missing in this situation would mean taking out half the town—and that meant endangering the hostages.