The Pirate Hunters ph-1

by Mack Maloney

  Nolan looked him straight in the eye and said, “So am I.”

  * * *

  Bebe’s business meeting started with the sound of a ringing bell.

  On this signal, all of the male guests and their bodyguards were summoned to the ship’s central function room, located on the fifth deck. Nolan had three of the 50-calibers manned, on display as the family associates walked by, each man flanked by his hired heat, except the half-dozen professor-looking types, who looked even more out of place than before. Per Nolan’s plan, the work copter was in the air, Batman noisily circling the ship. But like the big guns, it was for show more than anything else.

  Once everyone was inside the function room, Nolan and Crash stood guard at the only door that led in and out of the place. Nolan didn’t want to know what was going on inside. That was not part of the job.

  But Crash’s curiosity was stronger, and eventually it got the best of him. The door leading into the function hall was made of frosted glass with intricate designs cut into it. The designs were made of clear glass, providing hundreds of peepholes.

  Crash couldn’t resist taking a peek.

  “What the fuck?” he gasped, pushing his eye against the window. “This is weird…”

  Nolan was embarrassed by Crash’s behavior, but the curiosity was getting to him, too.

  “What is it?” he asked Crash in a hushed tone.

  “You gotta see it for yourself,” was his reply.

  Against all his instincts, Nolan put his good eye up against the glass and looked inside. What he saw was baffling.

  The men were sitting around a huge table covered with rocks. All shapes. All sizes. Nothing but rocks.

  It didn’t make sense.

  Had he seen them dividing up drugs, or gold, or diamonds, or even weapons, he would have understood.

  But rocks?

  “What the hell is up with that?” Crash asked him.

  Nolan had no idea — and it wasn’t like he was going to ask anyone, especially Bebe.

  “If they want to pay us a quarter million for protecting rocks,” he told Crash, “that’s fine with me.”

  * * *

  The business meeting lasted just thirty minutes.

  The attendees streamed out of the hall when it was over, laughing and joking in several languages. Some of their goons were carrying suitcases they could barely get off the floor.

  The guests walked past Nolan and Crash like they weren’t there. The last person out of the room was Bebe.

  “Business over for a while,” he told them. “Now party begins.”

  “How long will it last?” Nolan asked him, checking his watch.

  Bebe laughed. “Maybe forever,” he replied.

  * * *

  When Nolan walked the main deck and found Gunner at his machine-gun station having his picture taken with two gorgeous women, he knew the celebration had begun. A third was wielding the camera. They were all wearing micro-bikinis, and all were drop-dead gorgeous.

  “How could I resist?” Gunner said to Nolan as he walked by. “They said they’re crazy about my uniform.”

  Nolan gave him a mock salute and kept on walking.

  He next came upon the so-called Big Pond. It was an Olympic-size swimming pool, also located on the main deck, which featured a semisubmerged wraparound bar. The pool area was already crowded with party girls, again all of them out-of-this-world beautiful. The business associates were just starting to wade into this area, followed by their bodyguards. Soon the champagne was flowing like water.

  About 200 feet above the pool, the work copter was hovering; it was Batman’s way of telling a joke, as in: “I got this place covered.”

  Two beauties walked up to Nolan and tried to get him to drink a glass of champagne. They said his eye patch was sexy.

  He politely declined their offer.

  “Maybe when I’m off duty,” he told them — and kept on walking.

  Just as he was passing the far end of the pool, he saw a group of women remove their bikini tops. There was a great cheer from those sitting at the submerged bar, and soon more of the women took off their tops. Waiters with trays arrived, filled not just with drinks, but also with bowls of cocaine. A slight yelp from the deep end caught Nolan’s attention; one of the guests was having sex with one of the party girls in full view. Music was playing, people were cheering. It was like a live-action porn flick. The party had been on for exactly five minutes.

  Nolan kept on walking, leaving the peals of delight behind.

  It was like being a mall cop again.

  * * *

  It only got worse — or better, depending on the point of view — as the afternoon went on.

  Nolan walked the decks continuously, sweating in his new uniform, looking in on various staterooms and halls, the game rooms and the casinos. He saw the same thing in each one: men, women, drugs, debauchery. Liquor flowed; waiters rushed through the passageways pushing carts full of so much food, there seemed to be no way it could all be eaten by the people on the ship. The sweet scent of marijuana was everywhere, and everyone he saw seemed to be sniffing their way through a nonexistent head cold.

  All of this would have bothered him in his previous life, before everything changed at Tora Bora. But now? The only thing bothering him was how little all this was bothering him. It sounded like a cliché, but he’d joined the U.S. military to fight for truth, justice and the American way, only to find that the American way had little to do with truth or justice, at least as far as his case was concerned.

  He was smarter now. This sort of thing — what Bebe was up to — was what made the world go round. People with their little miserable lives could either ignore it or carve off a piece for themselves. But whatever they decided to do, Nolan knew it wasn’t up to him to stand in their way. He had no pension. He had no retirement fund. All that had gone away the moment he decided to pursue bin Laden on his own. And though he felt deep down that he was pursuing him still, he was in no position to turn down any job that would bring some money his way. They’d been fabulously lucky in the past month with their maritime security thing, and he would have been crazy to give it up just because he didn’t approve of the people who were paying the bills. For him, now, looking out for number one had to be a full-time job — because no one else would do it for him. Not anymore.

  Or at least that’s what he was trying to tell himself.

  * * *

  The afternoon slowly turned into twilight.

  The Althea Dawn meandered its way through the sea, passing islands, escorted by dolphins, heading into the last of the sunset, and all the while the work copter flew cover overhead and the team members walked the decks, heavily armed, sweating in the late-day heat, making sure everyone was safe to party.

  The first sign of trouble came just after the sun went down. Batman had just landed to refuel when a passenger yelled that small boats were approaching the ship. Nolan had just sat down in their suite for a cup of iced coffee when he heard the person calling out on the starboard side. He rushed to the deck, alerting the other team members on walkie-talkies Bebe had supplied. But by the time he got outside, the boats had disappeared.

  Nolan searched the water with his night-vision scope, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but finding nothing. The boats, if they existed, could have been from any of the nearby islands — fishing boats, yachts and ferries all sailed these waters, and he tried to explain this to the crowd that had gathered near the scene. But still, word went around the ship quickly that someone was stalking them.

  Things eventually calmed down and the party resumed. Nolan returned to walking the decks, checking on the team members now manning the highly visible 50-caliber machine guns. Scantily clad girls and thug-like men roamed from room to room, doing drugs, having sex, and on many occasions, videotaping the activities.

  At one point, Nolan thought, “Who can keep this up for two more days?”

  Then he remembered the guest who’d come aboard with t
he briefcase stuffed with cocaine and Viagra.

  And he had his answer.

  * * *

  Night fell.

  At about 2100 hours, Nolan’s radio beeped. Bebe wanted to see him in the top-deck bar.

  He made his way to the top of the ship, where he found the Russian sitting with four shots of vodka and a half-dozen sat phones spread out before him.

  He was ending a phone call when Nolan approached. Bebe held up his hand, freezing Nolan for a moment. The Russian downed the four shots without stopping to take a breath, then indicated the bartender should pour four more. Then he signaled Nolan to sit down.

  “Bad news getting worse,” Bebe told Nolan, who was finally able to get a glass of iced coffee. “Friends on land telling me chatter say attack on us is coming imminent. No ideas how, just that it hits soon.”

  Nolan could sense Bebe was concerned, and that was not a good thing. He wracked his brain thinking of what form this attack might take.

  Some things he could dismiss out of hand; this wasn’t a bad action movie they were living in. He was sure the attack would not come in the form of a rogue cruise missile or a torpedo fired from a submarine owned by some secret organization that wanted to rule the world. A suicide attack like on the USS Cole was the more likely possibility — but between the team members on deck and Batman constantly circling overhead, and everyone being equipped with night vision, they would see something like that coming from far away and in plenty of time to stop it.

  “Are you sure every bodyguard on board has been cleared?” Nolan asked Bebe as he dove into his second quartet of vodka shots.

  “Done a dozen times,” was Bebe’s rough reply. “Plus, it would take every bodyguard on board to be dirty to turn on us all.”

  “How about those eggheads that came onboard — the guys who look like college professors?”

  Bebe laughed. “They are college professors and they were needed on this voyage. But we have their wives and families at secret locations to be released only when we all come home safe. It is not them. Threat is coming from someone else.”

  Bebe downed four more shots, but they seemed to be having zero effect on him.

  “Most important is that vast majority of peoples on ship don’t worry about what we know,” he told Nolan. “Everyone must have good time or whole thing has been failure.”

  * * *

  Nolan left Bebe as he was ordering four more shots, and resumed his rounds.

  He checked with Gunner, Crash and Twitch. All was well with them. They were constantly scanning all sides of the ship, bow to stern, with their night-vision goggles. No vessel had come within a mile of the Althea Dawn all night.

  He found Batman on the back end, fueling up again. Like the others, he’d seen nothing suspicious, and his aerial field of view was up to twenty miles in all directions. Their prior conversation on money matters forgotten, Batman took off again in the work copter to once more circle the ship.

  Not thirty seconds later, gunfire broke out.

  It came from the port side, near the bow. Nolan rushed down the deck, picking up Crash along the way, pushing through a caravan of waiters delivering a ton of food somewhere. Up on the bow they found two bodyguards firing into the dark waters with huge handguns. Nolan quickly got them to stop shooting and asked what they were firing at.

  Through slurred, broken English, one said he’d seen two boats full of men dressed in black approach the side of the ship. But the other man claimed he saw just one boat, and the men on board were all wearing white, not black. The bodyguards argued about this, waving their guns around wildly.

  As Crash disarmed the two goons, Nolan scanned the waters below. He saw nothing. He called up to Batman, who also reported seeing nothing. Both bodyguards were highly intoxicated; so much so, Nolan was surprised they hadn’t killed each other instead of just throwing bullets into the water.

  But the gunfire had attracted the attention of just about everyone on the boat. In less than a minute, a large crowd had gathered on the bow. A ripple of uneasiness went through the passengers.

  This got Nolan thinking: “How can I take another two days of this?”

  * * *

  He walked back to the stern, hoping to catch a cool breeze.

  The moon was up, and it seemed an idyllic scene if it were not for the imminent threat of an attack on the ship. He stared at the moon and his mind wandered. He was engaged once, long ago, to a beautiful girl. She’d wanted to sail the Med for their honeymoon.

  “I guess this is as close as I’m going to get,” he thought aloud.

  But then a feeling came over him. It was the same feeling he’d experienced just before they’d found Zeek’s fuel supply that night. The same feeling he had when he was about to win a hand of poker.

  The ship had been threatened, and Bebe had hinted that the people behind the threat were gangsters and criminals, just like Bebe and his friends. The top of the food chain when it came to criminal activity in Eastern Europe.

  In other words, they were smart.

  And smart people would not openly attack a boat full of heavily armed bodyguards and a security team, with an armed helicopter flying over it.

  They would do it a different way.

  But how?

  Had he forgotten anything? Every passenger was checked coming aboard. Every piece of luggage, every hired goon. Bebe had had the ship swept for bombs prior to bringing the team into the mix, and they had swept it again, inside and out.

  What was left?

  Nolan looked out on the ship’s wake. Microscopic animals and algae churned up by the ship’s propulsion gear left a trail of eerie phosphorous as the vessel moved through the calm, tranquil seas.

  The ventilation system? he thought. No — the ship was not a closed system, so sending poison gas through it might affect a handful of people at the most. Plus, it was too James Bond-ish.

  The water system? Nolan looked around him. Who the hell was drinking water here? No one. Or not enough people to score a major kill like Bebe’s contacts were telling him was coming.

  Air, water and…

  At that moment, Nolan heard a small commotion below him. Two men were out on the service balcony at the very bottom of the ship. They were kitchen workers. One dumped a bucket of garbage overboard; the other had a large white bowl full of a black substance, moist and oily. He also had a spoon with him. They were talking in hushed tones, speaking Greek. They had no idea Nolan was watching them.

  Throwing the garbage overboard had attracted a gang of seagulls that now were trailing the boat. The two men seemed very interested in the seagulls and began throwing more food to them. One seagull was braver than the rest and kept coming closer and closer to the service balcony as the men continued to throw out scraps. Once this gull got very close, the worker with the bowl took a spoonful of the black substance and flung it into the wind.

  The seagull caught a mouthful of it in midair. In an instant, it turned over and nose-dived into the sea, scattering bloody feathers everywhere.

  Nolan couldn’t believe it.

  “Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “How could I be so dumb?”

  * * *

  Bebe was just ushering his guests into the main dining hall when Nolan found him.

  “You and I have to go down to the kitchen immediately,” he told Bebe as inconspicuously as possible.

  But Bebe was not happy to hear this.

  “This most important meeting of trip,” he told Nolan. “This is the big meal where money changes hands. Do you know of missile heading for us? Or explosive boat coming alongside?”

  Nolan was firm. “No — but money changing hands might not be an option if you don’t come with me right now.”

  * * *

  They walked into the ship’s kitchen two minutes later.

  A small army of cooks and waiters were madly preparing meals for the guests three decks above. It was a snapshot of controlled chaos, like a restaurant reality show. Nolan quickly spotted
the two men he wanted to question.

  Still not happy, Bebe followed him across the kitchen to where the dinner’s first course was being prepared. The two men Nolan had spied out on the balcony were surprised to see the heavily armed Nolan and the woolen-suited Bebe standing behind them.

  Nolan zoomed in on an enormous bowl of caviar, aka Russian Ice Cream. The two men were hovering over it. He turned to the man he’d seen throwing the black stuff to the seagulls. He seemed to be a Greek national, but it was hard to tell.

  “Speak English?” he asked the man.

  The man nodded nervously.

  Nolan took a spoonful of the caviar and handed it to him.

  “Eat this,” he ordered the man.

  The man’s face turned white.

  “I cannot,” he said in a thick accent. “Too expensive for a worker like me.”

  “If it’s good enough for the seagulls, it’s good enough for you,” Nolan told him. “Eat it…”

  The man started furiously shaking his head no. Now the rest of the kitchen crew was paying attention.

  Bebe nudged Nolan aside. He towered over the kitchen worker.

  “Eat,” he told the man.

  The man was so frightened, he wet himself. The caviar had been spiked, it turned out, with the venom of the Sydney Funnel Spider, one of the deadliest toxins in the world. One drop the size of a pinhead was enough to kill several hundred people. And that’s how it had been smuggled aboard: a drop encased in wax and affixed to the end of a common pin hidden in the kitchen worker’s sewing kit. Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have found it.

  “Eat!” Bebe roared at him again, taking out his massive handgun to make his point.

  When the kitchen worker finally put the spoon to his lips, Bebe forced it between his teeth and made him swallow. The man’s eyes went wide — and blood instantly gushed from his nose and mouth.

  He dropped to the deck, dead before he hit the floor.

  * * *

  The cruise ship returned to Kronos two nights later.

  The guests were ushered off, each picked up by a limo or armored SUV. Once again, the Greek police were nearby, but did their best to ignore what was going on at the berth.