The Pirate Hunters ph-1

by Mack Maloney

  “They’re all ex-Delta Force,” Conley said, acknowledging the gravity of his words. “I found them working as rent-a-cops in Saudi Arabia. I heard they were looking to get into maritime security, so I gave them a shot.”

  Kilos was immediately wary. “But why would ex-Delta operators be working as rent-a-cops? The world grows more dangerous every day, yet these people were barely employed? You mean, even Blackwater wouldn’t hire them — or whatever it is called these days?”

  “They told me they were considered too ‘disruptive’ for Blackwater,” Conley replied. “Or any other private security company.”

  “An odd word, ‘disruptive,’ ” Kilos said.

  “It has to do with why they were bounced from Delta,” Conley told him. “I did some checking. They went on an unauthorized mission — to kill bin Laden himself. But just when he was in their grasp, Washington told them to let him go.”

  Kilos was amazed. “Really?”

  Conley nodded. “They were victims of the politics, I guess. An ugly severance from the U.S. military followed, and because all their old friends now work for Blackwater, they wanted nothing to do with them.”

  Conley paused, then asked: “Want to meet them?”

  “I do,” Kilos said. “I’d like to thank the people who just saved us a hundred million dollars.”

  Conley grabbed his laptop and a briefcase and they walked into the adjacent office. Here they found the five men, dressed in black camouflage uniforms, lounging on the office’s three couches. Their exotic weaponry was scattered around the room.

  Cowboys. That was the first word to come to Kilos’s mind. All five were undeniably American in their looks and demeanor. But he could tell they were also hard-bitten, hard-drinking, cynical, bitter — and very tough. They made his bodyguards look like choirboys.

  They were all in their late thirties or so, he guessed, but each man appeared old beyond his years. All of them had scars on their hands and faces. One wore a black patch over his left eye. Another had a prosthetic leg.

  When Kilos walked in, they slowly got to their feet. He embraced each man, kissing them on both cheeks. They were less than warm in returning the gesture — but it didn’t matter. These men had just done Kilos an enormous favor.

  “It is my good fortune that you were available when we needed you,” he told them. “It would have been disastrous if those pirates actually got away with our ship.”

  There was only a token amount of mumbled acknowledgment from the five men.

  Kilos went on: “I’m also told you kept the gunplay down to a minimum while dealing with those animals — again, just as we had hoped.”

  One man spoke up. He had spiked, bleached blond hair, though he seemed a little old for such a style.

  “Sure didn’t want to pop any windshields on those BMWs,” he said. “That glass must go for at least a grand, right?”

  Both Kilos and Conley laughed. “It was not the BMWs we were worried about,” Conley said. Then he asked, “How much do you know about the pirate gang you squashed last night?”

  “Just what you told us,” the man with the eye patch said. “That they attacked a Filipino trawler and a Danish freighter the night before.”

  “Well, those ships were carrying stuff off the manifest, too,” Conley revealed. “The Filipino ship had fifty pounds of heroin on board. The Danish ship was carrying illegal ammunition for delivery to Hamas.”

  “Did you just say ‘too?’ ” the man with the eye patch asked. “You mean there was something else on your ship besides BMWs?”

  Conley contemplated them for a moment, then looked at Kilos. The shipping magnate nodded once and said: “They’re big boys. They can take it.”

  Conley opened his laptop and put it on the table in front of the men. “We want to show you something,” he said.

  The laptop’s screen came to life and they were soon taking a virtual tour of the Global Warrior’s cargo hold, the same place where the men had hunted down and killed four of the pirates the night before.

  Though it still looked like a vast forest of stacked BMWs, a digital overlay revealed something else: a cache of large military weapons including rocket launchers, crates of air-to-air missiles, several large antiaircraft guns, armored cars and smart bombs, all shrink-wrapped, all hidden among the used luxury cars.

  “This is what you saved for me,” Kilos said. “Shall we call it ‘secondhand military hardware?’ In any case, there’s more value there than in a thousand used BMWs, especially to the people we’re moving it for. However, if one stray bullet had hit one of those air-to-air missiles, or a smart bomb? The whole ship would have gone up — and you along with it. That’s why we requested you keep the gunplay to a minimum. And that’s why we are so appreciative.”

  He nodded to Conley, and the security manager opened his briefcase. Inside were several packs of crisp $500 bills held together by rubber bands. Kilos counted out $10,000 for each man and handed it to him.

  “We heard the leader of that pirate gang was bad news,” Kilos told them as Conley distributed the money. “Apparently he was nothing like the Somalis who hijack ships using canoes and knives. May I ask you just how you did it?”

  The man with the eye patch shrugged. “As soon as we got on board, we asked your crew to stop one of the engines,” he said, still studying the screen showing the hidden weapons. “We figured at the very least these guys would spot us traveling slow, and so far off the shipping lanes, we’d be too good of a target to pass up. And once they came on board, well…”

  He let his voice trail off. Kilos knew that was all the explanation he was going to get.

  “Look, we’re not angels,” Kilos told them, lowering his voice. “In this business, few people are. So I’ll tell you a little secret: Black-market weapons are among the most profitable cargoes to carry these days. They are easy to handle, easy to ship, easy to sell. Just as long as the anti-piracy patrols don’t find you, or the pirates themselves, it’s a quick way to make a lot of money, off the books.

  “Now we have some important shipments coming up. We have to protect them, without bringing any attention to ourselves. We don’t want any of the NATO naval ships to be involved. If any of them got a real look at our cargo holds, it would not be good.”

  Conley spoke now: “This guy you greased, Turk Kurjan. He might be gone, but we’ve learned he has a brother, over in Indonesia, who could follow in his footsteps. Turk had informants in some key places — he probably even had a clue what we were carrying on the Global Warrior. If his brother decides to pick up where he left off, and is half as good as Turk was, it could make things difficult for us.”

  “This is why it would be in our best interest to deal with this brother right now,” Kilos said. “Before he becomes a problem. And of course, do so as quietly as possible.”

  An uneasy silence fell on the room.

  Conley said: “So — are you guys interested in more work?”

  PART TWO

  Reunion — One Year Earlier

  5

  Lost Limb Ward

  Building 18

  Walter Reed Army Medical Center

  It wasn’t the cockroaches that finally got to Twitch.

  Nor was it the chronic infection above his severed knee, the perpetual phantom pain, the paint chips falling on and into everything, or the drug dealers who roamed the halls of Building 18 at will.

  It was the mouse shit. It was everywhere — around his bed, on his sheets, on his meal tray, on his clothes. In his only shoe.

  He never saw the little bastards, only their droppings. And they made him sick to his stomach, especially in the morning, when he was usually in the bathroom puking anyway. In the perpetually humid LLW — the Lost Limb Ward — the mouse shit produced a smell of its own. A package of rancid hamburger left rotting in the sun offered a good comparison.

  Twitch had been stuck in the same boxlike, four-bed room for three years, his fifth hospitalization since 2001, when he left most of
his right leg back in Tora Bora. Besides the unsanitary conditions, Building 18 was a nightmare of Army bureaucracy. Every patient needed a case manager, but it took twenty-two documents, filed with eight separate Army commands, just to arrange an initial sit-down with one. Every time Twitch got close to getting all twenty-two documents approved, they would inevitably get lost, in a computer crash or through a misplaced file, or simply into the ether. No case manager meant Twitch had no contact with the outside world, no way to get things he needed, no way to complain. No way to get out.

  It didn’t end there. His physical therapist was so incompetent, Twitch suspected he was on drugs or perhaps brain-damaged. Sometimes Twitch would wear his prosthetic leg; other times he’d get around in a wheelchair, if one was available. Because of this, his physical therapist came to believe he was two different people and demanded the proper paperwork from him every time he arrived for a session, which was infrequently.

  The last straw came during a ceremony marking the anniversary of 9/11. Twitch had never gotten a replacement for the uniform they’d torn off him that horrible day in Tora Bora. When he finally tracked down the clerk responsible for issuing new uniforms to those who had lost them in combat, the man demanded Twitch prove his fellow soldiers had destroyed his old uniform in the course of treating him. Twitch had no idea how to do that. Later that day, at the 9/11 observance, a soldier who had lost both legs, an arm and an eye in Iraq was being presented with his Purple Heart. The officer in charge of Building 18 had ordered all patients who could get out of bed to attend the ceremony. Twitch went in the only clothes he had — his gym clothes. The officer in charge chewed him out in front of the entire ward for being out of uniform.

  Returning to his bed, he found it again covered with mouse droppings. And that was it, the final straw. That’s when he decided to just end it all. He had no wife, no kids, no real family other than a few distant relatives back in Hawaii to whom he hadn’t spoken in years. Even if he ever were released from here, he had nowhere to go, no place to live, no prospects for employment. Not many demolition companies would hire a one-legged charge setter. He didn’t want to do it, but he just couldn’t take it anymore.

  That day, he set about hoarding his codeine painkillers, and after three weeks had fifty-six in all. With high irony, he’d bought a bottle of paregoric and 100 aspirins from one of the coke dealers he saw regularly walking the halls. On the day before his thirty-seventh birthday, Twitch crushed the codeine pills and the aspirins into a powder and mixed them with the paregoric. The result was a cocktail that he was sure would end his life peacefully.

  He waited until the lights went out in the LLW that night, then retrieved the potent concoction from beneath his bed. He put the plastic cup up to his lips, tried to remember a prayer, couldn’t, and started to drink.

  That’s when the man in doctor’s scrubs and mask strolled into his room, turned on the light, and told Twitch that he was being moved.

  “Moved? Where?” Twitch asked him, stunned and confused. It was the middle of the night.

  “Back to the real world,” was the reply.

  The man lowered his mask and Twitch realized it was his old friend, Crash.

  He’d never forget what his former Delta mate said to him next: “You’re too good to be wasting away in here, buddy. So I’m breaking you out.”

  Twitch had already swallowed a bit of his suicide cocktail, so all this was like a dream. Yet, he didn’t question how Crash was going to do it; he didn’t care. What did he have to lose? So he climbed into his gym clothes, put his leg on, and then flushed the rest of his deadly drink down the toilet.

  Then he hobbled outside, with Crash leading the way. A couple of orderlies challenged them outside the main door, but his old teammate growled them away.

  By now, Twitch felt like he was floating. It didn’t seem real. One second he was about to end it all, and the next, he was sitting in the front seat of Crash’s rental car, speeding out the front gates of Hell.

  The Bahamas

  The next day

  The night it happened, Batman Bob Graves thought he was having a nervous breakdown.

  He’d been living in paradise for the past year. A ten-room waterfront villa, perched on one of the highest elevations in the Bahamas, surrounded by plant life that seemed sprung from heaven. The ocean water he looked out on every day was the most amazing shade of blue, and the stars at night were absolutely brilliant. Whenever he wanted to, he could break out his telescope and look northeast, into the heart of the Bermuda Triangle, and wonder what exactly was happening out there.

  This life was everything he thought he’d ever need. He had money. He had privacy. He wanted for nothing.

  But he was miserable.

  Even worse, he was paranoid. He lived alone, but was always looking over his shoulder. His nearest neighbor was two miles away, a light year in terms of Bahamian real estate. Yet he always heard voices at night, or thought he saw someone sneaking through the bushes during the day. Did he really lock that door, or unlock that second-floor window? Who turned on the lawn sprinkler the other morning? Was his rental car’s interior sky blue when he first got it? He thought it had been red. These sorts of things had been happening with much frequency lately, and it was scarier than any kind of combat he’d ever been in.

  As with every other night, this night he’d called for a dinner delivery at 8 P.M. He had a deal with a restaurant farther up the beach, and usually these things took a matter of minutes from phone call to drop-off. He’d been on Xuila for a year, and never had a food delivery been more than a twenty-minute wait. But by 10 P.M., he’d still seen nothing of it.

  He sat on the front porch waiting, praying to see the headlights of the delivery Mini bumping along the beach road. To his mind, if his meal didn’t come, that meant something was really wrong. But he saw nothing, not even the darkened car coming from the other direction, creeping up his steep gravel driveway.

  But the sound of his front gate being opened? That he’d heard clearly. It sent him into a full-fledged panic attack. Someone had sneaked up on him, his worst fear come true. And he had no way to protect himself. Not for the first time since coming here, he cursed himself for not bringing a gun.

  When he heard the front door squeak open, and then the sound of footsteps in the hallway, he knew it was the end of him. He sensed two dark figures standing behind him, saw their scrambled reflections in the porch window. He froze, unable to move, unable to even reach for the phone and call for help. There was no way he could call in a JDAM this time. He was unarmed and had made himself too many enemies.

  So he turned to face the music, only to find it was Crash and Twitch standing behind him.

  He barely recognized them; he hadn’t seen them in eight years. Crash looked older, a more-sophisticated surfer dude. Twitch? Well, he looked a mess.

  He almost threw his chair at them.

  “What the fuck?” he kept saying over and over.

  “You’re getting nervous in your old age,” Crash said calmly.

  He pulled them both into the porch and closed the front door behind them, furious but immeasurably relieved. “What the hell are you guys doing here? How did you find me?”

  Both collapsed on a long divan.

  “It’s 2009,” Crash replied nonchalantly. “Anyone can find anyone these days. What do you have to drink?”

  Batman sprinted into the kitchen and returned with a six-pack of Red Stripe beer. Crash drank one bottle in a long, noisy gulp. Twitch could barely twist the cap off his.

  Batman checked the locks on the front door again.

  “What’s your problem?” Crash asked him. “I thought you’d be thrilled to see us.”

  Batman calmed down. He opened a beer. “It’s hard to be thrilled about anything when half the fucking world is looking for you.”

  “So I heard,” Crash said, taking another beer. “Who’s worse? SEC? FTC? FBI?”

  “All of them and ones I don’t even know about,”
Batman replied. “You think bin Laden and his crew were bad? These Wall Street cops make them look like fairies.”

  “Hey, can you blame them?” Crash said. “Your name is right up there with Bernie Madoff. I mean, I thought you were doing the best out of all of us. I saw you in BusinessWeek, Forbes. Caught you on CNBC a bunch of times. So what happened?”

  Batman’s relief turned to defiance. “I wasn’t involved with Madoff. Let’s get that straight. I was just doing side deals on what he was into.”

  “Like what?”

  Batman shrugged. “I was selling Madoff shares to people who knew it was a Ponzi scheme but still wanted in.”

  “There are people that stupid?”

  “It wasn’t as stupid as it sounds,” Batman told him. “They wanted in because it was quick money and they thought the government would bail out Madoff’s investors once the whole thing came crashing down — just like they bailed out those assholes at AIG and the others. But they didn’t. And so here I am. Trying my best to stay out of sight, and feeling like shit day and night.”

  Batman drank more of his beer. “So really — why are you here, after all these years?”

  “I got a call from Gunner,” Crash said. “He wanted to know if we were interested in work overseas.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Security work for the Saudis. That’s all he could tell me. But he said it would be good pay if I could get the whole gang back together. Of course, it might not be the kind of money you’re used to.”

  Batman took another swig of his beer. “At this point, don’t assume anything.”

  “Well, if you’re interested, there’s something we got to do first,” Crash told him.

  “Snake?”

  “Did you hear what happened at his trial?”

  Batman stopped in mid-sip. “I didn’t even know he had a trial.”

  Crash produced a DVD. “I was freelancing as a shooter in Southeast Asia earlier this year; I saved a guy’s ass on Sri Lanka during their last big battle against the Tamils. This guy was another ex-Delta operator, and he’s like an octopus, he has so many connections. He owed me the favor, so when we got out of there, I asked him to track down Snake. He gave me this.”