Pirate Alley

CHAPTER THREE

Admiral Toad Tarkington stared at the flat-screen display. The destroyer, Richard Ward, was about an hour away from Sultan of the Seas. His flagship, Chosin Reservoir, an amphibious assault ship with the majority of a Marine Expeditionary Unit, an MEU, embarked, was two hours away. The ship was at flight quarters; the helicopters were being readied.

But for what?

The MEU, with 2,200 marines, was a fast reaction force that carried its own logistics. It had choppers, landing craft, artillery and armor, plus the ammo and food to sustain itself anywhere it was inserted. One of the marine units was a Force Recon team, the tip of the marine spear, and was specially trained to board ships under hostile fire.

Toad looked around the ops space. Sure enough, the colonel commanding the MEU was behind him, watching the whole evolution. Toad motioned to him.

The marine’s name was Maximus Zakhem, and he didn’t have two pounds of extra fat on him. With square shoulders and a square face, hair in a buzz cut that made it almost invisible on his tanned head, he looked every inch a professional warrior. Some of the naval officers referred to him as the marine from central casting, behind his back, of course. Still, Colonel Zakhem did a hundred push-ups every morning just to get the blood flowing and then worked out on the flight deck with his men. There wasn’t a private or lance corporal in his command in better physical shape. He could even go step for step with the sergeants of Force Recon, who were fifteen to twenty years younger than he was.

The admiral’s chief of staff and his operations officer joined them.

Admiral Tarkington summarized the situation. Since he had been watching for the last hour, Colonel Zakhem had no questions.

“The pirates will probably take the cruise ship south to a Somali port,” Toad said with a sigh, then paused to listen to a call from the bridge of Sultan.

“Pirates are aboard. At least a dozen. They will undoubtedly be upon the bridge, what’s left of it, in seconds.” There followed a burst of gunfire; then the radio went dead.

Colonel Zakhem broke the silence with the remark, “That captain had a tough decision to make. He was trying to save the lives of his passengers and crew. Surrendering was the right thing to do.”

He and the admiral knew the pirates would kill just enough people to horrify and frighten the cruise ship owners, but no more, so they could demand a big ransom and get it. Like politics and prostitution, piracy was all about the money.

“We could intercept them on the way to Somalia,” Toad Tarkington said, musing aloud. “What do you think?”

“Board the ship?”

Toad shrugged. Boarding was only one possibility.

Zakhem took a deep breath. “It could be done, Admiral … if you are willing to accept civilian casualties. A packed cruise ship … my men will have to go after the pirates aggressively and defend themselves.”

Toad stirred uncomfortably in his chair. Over eight hundred civilians. Scenes of slaughter ran through his mind. He listened to the thoughts of his chief of staff, a navy captain, and his operations officer, a commander, but he had already decided.

“We’ll intercept the liner,” Tarkington said, his mind made up. “Try to intimidate the pirates with a show of force. Ops, get the task force on a course to intercept. Have Richard Ward close and stay out of rifle shot off their beam while we get more ships there. In the meantime, I want a helo over the ship continuously. They are to stay out of range of RPGs and machine guns.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“We’ve lost a chopper off the Ward. Launch a couple from this ship to search for survivors and take photos. I want shots of that cruise ship from every possible angle.”

“Sir, how about picking up pirates from the ocean?”

“Anybody they can find,” the admiral said. “I’d like some prisoners to interrogate to see if we can find out just what we’re up against.”

He addressed his next sentence to the chief of staff. “Send a message to the strike group commander.” This was the admiral aboard the carrier three hundred miles northeast. “I would appreciate it if he would bring his force to rendezvous with all possible speed, if his operational commitments will allow it. We could certainly use an E-2 as soon as possible.” The E-2 Hawkeye carried a huge radar dish on its back and could act as an eye in the sky, relaying messages and data-linking contacts.

He eyed Zakhem. “We’ll use all your marines. Transfer as many as practicable to Richard Ward. I want them lining the decks of both ships, armed, in helmets, apparently ready to shoot if even one of those sons takes a pot shot. Actual shooting will be done by snipers, on officers’ orders. Force Recon marines will be overhead in choppers and Ospreys, ready to rappel down. I want to put the fear of God in these people, show them overwhelming military force. Saddle up your troops and brief them.”

“Yes, sir,” Zakhem said. “With your permission, sir, I want to be in an Osprey, ready to go down the rope if we get to board.”

Toad paused. Zakhem might be needed later to lead his entire command. Allowing him to go into combat was a calculated risk. Still, Max Zakhem was no headquarters paper-pusher. He had fought in three wars and had the scars to prove it. In an opposed boarding of a cruise liner packed with noncombatants his experience and judgment might prove invaluable.

The admiral smiled grimly. “Of course, Colonel.”

The colonel and Toad’s two staffers hustled away, leaving him to stare at the tactical situation display. Time was on his side. He had plenty of time to marshal his troops and make an overwhelming show of force. That tactic, he thought, had an excellent chance of success with little downside. Although the pirates could murder a few people to prove they meant business, killing passengers wouldn’t make the navy and marines go away. Regardless of what they did, the pirates had to be made to realize they couldn’t win.

And if the show of force didn’t work, he could try to put a SEAL team aboard. If everything failed, hell, maybe the politicians would elect to pay the money the pirates would demand.

Mustafa al-Said walked confidently through the passageway that led to the bridge. He knew exactly where this passageway led because he had carefully studied the deck plan for this ship. Someone had downloaded it from the Internet several weeks ago.

Two men accompanied him. They held their AKs at hip level, ready to fire. The people sitting on the deck against the bulkhead pulled in their feet and looked at the three Somalis curiously.

The door to the bridge was sprung. No doubt from the RPG.

Mustafa gestured, and his men forced it open. Mustafa walked through into a scene from a slaughterhouse. He had seen shot-up bridges before and expected it.

The captain was the man in uniform with four stripes on his tabs, bloody, trying to stand erect near the steering station. An arm and a disemboweled body lay on the floor, and a bloody mist had turned everything pink. Even the captain’s uniform. One sailor, the helmsman, sat on the deck beside the steering station, bleeding from a leg wound. Two other sailors appeared uninjured. They were trying to staunch the flow of blood from another injured officer.

Mustafa could see the captain was unarmed. They all were. His two men spread out to cover them with their weapons anyway.

Mustafa walked out to the port wing of the bridge and looked aft. Men were climbing from a skiff up ropes attached to grappling hooks. There were only two men left in the skiff. They secured a rope to a machine gun on a tripod, and the men on deck hauled it up. The last rope went around a box of ammo. When gun and ammo were aboard, the last two men on the skiff abandoned it and began climbing hand over hand up the ropes.

Mustafa walked across the bridge to the other side, ignoring the dead and wounded men lying there. He merely walked around them without a glance.

On the starboard side was another skiff, with only three men in it tying up boxes of RPG launchers and ammo. Mustafa’s empty skiff was drifting about a hundred yards from the ship. He waited until the men in the skiff alongside were climbing the ropes and the skiff was drifting away before he turned and came back toward the center of the bridge.

“Captain Penney?”

“Yes.”

“Get your ship under way. All ahead one third.” Mustafa had a thick accent, but Penney was used to heavy accents and had no trouble understanding him. He reached for the engine controls and advanced them.

“Set course one-eight-zero.”

Penney glanced at the helmsman. “Medium rate of turn starboard. Steady up one-eight-zero.” Without getting up from the floor, the sailor used one hand to turn the indicator knob. The engines responded. It took perhaps ten seconds for the screws to bite and the ship’s head to begin swinging.

“You are going to talk to the crew and passengers on the ship’s loudspeakers,” Mustafa said, eyeing Penney. He held out a piece of paper. It had been folded into quarters and was damp. “You will say what is on the paper. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Penney unfolded the paper and began reading. The words were all in caps and legible, although the sentences appeared to be written by someone who wasn’t familiar with English syntax.

When Penney didn’t immediately respond, Mustafa pointed his rifle at the helmsman and pulled the trigger. One shot. In the head. The man’s head literally exploded.

Mustafa nudged Penney with the barrel of the rifle. “You steer. And talk.”

The dead helmsman was an Englishman from the Midlands who had been going to sea on merchant ships since he was eighteen. Now he was dead, at the age of thirty-nine. His name was Harry Hamm.

Mustafa nudged Penney again.

Looking at his dead and injured bridge team, the captain was past caring. “Shoot and be damned,” he said.

Mustafa spoke into his ear. “I kill you. I kill all them. All. I don’t care. Four boats of my men dead. In the sea. We live between life and death. For us, this only way. I kill as many as I want. Even you. You want to see them die? I shoot those two over there if you want. You want? We put you in water with my men, for the fish.”

Arch Penney watched the compass heading come slowly around. When it read due south, he zeroed out the rate indicator. He didn’t lead it enough. The compass settled on 185. Without conscious thought, he used a very slow turn rate to bring her back to 180.

Two more gunmen came in, and Mustafa gestured at the corpses. Without a word, the men picked them up, carried them to the side of the bridge, and threw them over. When the dead were gone, they picked up the wounded and threw them into the sea.

“No,” one of the bridge team screamed. They shot him in the stomach and threw him over, too.

Irene and Suzanne were sitting side by side, shoulder to shoulder, when the first pirate came in. He was dressed in dirty slacks, a pullover shirt, and tennis shoes. He carried his weapon nonchalantly. He was grinning.

“A happy man,” Irene whispered.

The grin vanished and the rifle was leveled at her. The man made a gesture, his hand across his throat, and looked around. Silence. Dead silence.

Another pirate came in. He breezed by the first one, ignored the passengers and headed straight for the buffet line. The food was still in serving trays. He reached in and grabbed a handful of something and tried it. Tossed it on the deck and snatched up a pancake, which he rolled up and began eating. He grunted at the first guy, who came over and did likewise.

They surveyed the drink table and sampled the juices, jabbering to themselves, with only an occasional glance at the thirty or so passengers huddled in the passageway. One of the women was audibly sobbing, on the verge of hysteria, Suzanne thought.

As the sisters watched, other pirates came in, six total, helped themselves to food, then left. Two of them actually used dishes, but they ignored the knives and forks.

While they were eating someone whispered to the sobbing woman, trying to comfort her.

The first pirate leveled his AK and fired a short burst down the passageway at the door. The bullets went by the heads of the seated passengers. Suzanne felt the muzzle blast, a mere ten feet from her head. The roar temporarily deafened them all.

The spent shells flew out of the AK into the food trays. One wound up in a dish of fruit.

A woman screamed. It was the woman who had been on the edge of hysteria. The pirates ignored her. They looked at the brass cartridge in the fruit dish and laughed.

The loudspeaker came to life with almost no warning. “This is the captain speaking. Our ship has been captured by pirates.” There was a pause as Penney converted the tortured text into real English. “You will obey every order,” he continued, his voice tired and flat, “or they will kill you. Obey orders and everyone will live. Disobey them and many of us will die.”

He paused again, cleared his throat and resumed speaking. “The on-duty crew members will remain at their work stations. Cooks will continue with food preparation. Engineers will remain in the engineering spaces. Off-duty crew members will stay in their quarters. All passengers will return to their staterooms and remain there until summoned for meals. That is all.”

The loudspeaker fell silent. Even the sobbing woman was silent.

Irene and Suzanne looked at each other, then at their fellow passengers, one of whom was shaking and talking soundlessly to himself, then finally at the pirates stuffing food into their mouths and looking at them.

Suzanne levered herself erect, grabbed her sister’s elbow. “Come on.”

The pirates watched and chewed and swallowed. They eyed the watches and jewelry—some of the women still had their diamond earrings and gold and silver bracelets on—but made no move to touch or grab.

Both women seized their purses, then joined the queue of people shuffling forward toward the elevators and passageways that would take them to their staterooms.

When they reached their stateroom, Benny and Sarah Cohen found tiny bits of glass all over the floor and furniture. The gentle sea breeze through the shot-up sliding door and windows seemed benign; it was a nice day.

Silently Sarah began cleaning up the mess so they would have a place to sit and sleep. Benny used a handkerchief to brush off the seat of the chair at the small desk, then sat on it and used a sleeve to clean off the surface of the desk. From his small leather travel case he extracted their passports. Israeli passports.

Benny Cohen sat staring at the covers. He could throw them overboard, of course. But every computer on this ship, and no doubt a dozen printed lists, listed his and Sarah’s passport details and their nationality.

Hell, if these pirates were Muslim fanatics, they wouldn’t need passports or computers. One look at his and Sarah’s names on a passenger list would be enough to get them killed.

He had been just a boy when his parents had escaped Europe after the war and wound up in Israel, penniless and half-starved. His father had died in the War of Independence.

Benny remembered him, young, skinny as a rail, with a mop of black hair and an Enfield rifle hanging from his shoulder with a sling. His face was indistinct, but the hair and rifle were right there when Benny thought of him.

He and Sarah had lost two sons in the 1973 war. One was in the infantry and the other was a tanker. The day they mobilized was a horrific frenzy; then they were gone. Never to return. One of them, Jesse, left a fiancée.

If only he had gotten her pregnant!

Benny felt Sarah’s hands on his shoulders. He looked up at the mirror above the desk and saw the reflection of her wonderful face, framed by gray hair. She glanced at the passports in his hand and knew what he had been thinking without a word being spoken. Her hands tightened on his shoulders and a trace of a smile crept across her face as she gazed at his reflection in the mirror.

Heinrich Beck vomited his breakfast into the toilet in his small cabin the instant he reached it. He turned on the sink tap experimentally and found he still had water, so he rinsed out his mouth and washed his face, then sat on his bed.

His stateroom didn’t have a balcony or sliding glass door, merely a porthole, perhaps ten feet above the surface of the ocean. It was intact.

Beck took some deep breaths and sat silently looking at nothing in particular until he was sure his stomach would behave. He was a veteran of the East German Stasi, the most feared secret police organization on the planet until it fell apart in the collapse of Communism. Heinrich Beck’s Stasi résumé was a secret, one he didn’t share with anyone.

His specialty was interrogations. He had learned from experts and enjoyed the work. Inflicting pain on others was one of life’s grandest pleasures.

Hadn’t done any of that for over twenty-five years, though. These days Heinrich Beck made a living smuggling cocaine. He had two kilos of the stuff hidden in the air ducts leading into and out of this cabin, perfectly safe from any cursory search by a curious maid or lazy policeman.

Now Heinrich Beck sat assessing his chances of getting to Doha and delivering the coke. What would the pirates do to him if they found the stuff? Confiscate it, obviously, but he doubted they would kill him. He would deny he knew anything about it, claim a crewman must have hidden it in his cabin.

He thought about how the denial would go.

Yes, he could pull it off with these people, he thought. With Herman Stehle, who owned the coke and had entrusted him to deliver it, loss of the drugs would be a different story. Stehle had the money and contacts to make it in the international narcotics trade, perhaps the most lucrative and homicidal on the planet. Beck certainly didn’t. Stehle gave him the stuff and told him who to deliver it to. Beck was merely a mule; he didn’t even see the money.

He had done a half dozen deliveries for Stehle, most to the Mideast, two to China.

Innocence was slippery stuff. Dozens of people had tried it on Heinrich Beck, and he remembered how it was with those who actually were not guilty of the crimes of which they were accused, how they acted, the looks on their faces, the perspiration on their skin, the smell of them. They weren’t truly innocent, of course—no one is innocent—but merely not guilty.

He wondered if Stehle would believe him if he said that pirates stole the stuff.

These pirates. Beck had seen them swagger around with their weapons, shooting here and there, enjoying themselves hugely. He hadn’t seen them kill anyone, but doubtlessly they could and would if the spirit moved them. Bang. Watch the blood splatter and the look on the victim’s face as he died. Smell the fear.

It would give the shooter such a sense of power. Almost orgasmic.

Beck felt warm as he thought about it.

Power. The power of life and death.

Heinrich Beck lit a cigarette and sat watching the smoke rise toward the return duct where the coke was stashed. It swirled a little and dissipated, but the duct sucked it up nonetheless.