Pirate Alley Page 6

  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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The capture of a cruise ship by Somali pirates was headline news worldwide, or would be when Europe and America woke up. The Pentagon received the Flash message from Task Force 151 so knew of it first. The bald facts went from the Pentagon’s duty officers to the White House night staff and assorted other government agencies within minutes.

  Jake Grafton was sound asleep at home when he received a call from the CIA situation room. Half awake, he grunted three or four times as he tried to absorb the story.

  “The director wants to meet with you and the other department heads at seven thirty.”

  “Fine,” Jake said and hung up.

  His wife, Callie, had awakened. The incident would certainly not be a secret long, he knew, so he said, “Task Force 151 reports Somali pirates have captured a cruise ship in the Gulf of Aden. About five hundred passengers and three hundred fifty crewmen.”

  Callie came wide awake. “Isn’t Toad Tarkington in command of that task force?”

  “Yes.”

  Toad had served as Jake’s aide for years when Jake was on active duty in the navy. After Jake retired, Toad went on to various assignments and had obviously impressed his superiors with his competence. Now he was a two-star admiral.

  Jake knew Toad had probably had a damn rough day in the Indian Ocean, and, if anything, tomorrow was going to be worse. Every politician from Washington to Doha, Beijing and Tokyo was going to tell Tarkington what he had done wrong. Being second-guessed went with the job. Jake forgot about Toad and began mulling the probable reaction of those same politicians after they stopped grousing and started thinking.

  He climbed from the bed and padded into the kitchen, where he fired off the coffeepot. Two in the morning, according to the clock in the microwave. As the coffee was brewing, he turned on the television.

  Within sixty seconds Fox News had it. News Flash. He flipped channels. Soon all the cable news networks were giving the story a big play. By the time the coffee was ready, one news channel was airing a photo of the ship, Sultan of the Seas, probably one the producer had just downloaded from the Internet.

  Callie came in wearing a robe over her pajamas, and together they watched the idiot tube as they sipped hot coffee. The news organizations didn’t have any more details, just the facts as announced by the Pentagon, so the talking heads began speculating. They wondered how much money the pirates would demand as ransom.

  A lot, Jake thought.

  “My God,” Callie whispered, “I’m glad we aren’t on that ship. And Amy isn’t.” Amy was their daughter.

  Jake finished his coffee. “Well, a lot of people are on that tub, and I guarantee you they all wish they weren’t.”

  He headed for the bathroom. Might as well shower, shave, get dressed and go to Langley. Before he went to the seven-thirty meeting he wanted to learn everything he could about the capture, read the follow-up message traffic, and talk to the people at the National Security Agency who monitored telephone and radio traffic in Somalia.

  In the shower, thinking about the crew and passengers on Sultan, he muttered, “Hang in there, people,” but no one heard him.

  * * *

  Mustafa al-Said had thirty-two men, three boatloads, aboard Sultan of the Seas. Their main defense against allied warships, airplanes and marines was the passengers and crew that they held captive. The civilians were hostages, pure and simple. If necessary, Mustafa knew he could shoot a handful every hour for a couple of days and still have plenty of people left alive to ransom. Of course, there was a risk. If he started shooting hostages, the enemy commander might decide to attack in order to rescue as many live hostages as possible. Mustafa certainly didn’t want to goad that infidel into pulling a big trigger.

  After leaving two men who could actually read a compass to keep a wary eye on the captain and his surviving officers, Mustafa went aft and began assigning topside positions to his men.

  Any attack, Mustafa thought, would probably come from the air. Helicopters would hover over the only open area topside, the pool area amidships, which was between the forward and aft superstructures. If attacking helos were allowed to machine-gun the top decks, clearing them of Somali fighters, then they could hover and marines could rappel to the deck. Mustafa was a realist; his men were pirates, not trained soldiers. The people they shot at didn’t shoot back. If more than a handful of marines got aboard, his men would be outfought, killed or captured.

  To keep attackers at bay he placed two machine guns forward, half-hidden inside the skin of the ship, with large windows to fire through. He had the men break out the glass. The third machine gun he placed aft, giving it the best possible field of fire. Men with RPG launchers were spotted inside the superstructure, out of sight of any helicopters that might approach, in position to step out and launch grenades when the choppers were in range and flying slowly.

  Finally, he sent below for twenty passengers, whom he had tied to deck chairs beside the pool, in plain sight of any helicopter or jet pilot passing by.

  While Mustafa was busy with all this, the first woman was raped on the second deck. She was a cook’s helper, twenty-three years old, from Sri Lanka. Three men dragged her to a bunk and took turns raping her while the others held the other three women in the compartment at bay with rifles.

  The pirates had been told to leave the women alone, but. They were young, ignorant, illiterate, and bucked with life. They had guns and no one else did. They were going to be rich. Here was opportunity and no one to tell them no. After all, fucking an infidel couldn’t be a sin. Didn’t the Prophet, may He rest in peace, say to kill all infidels?

  At first the woman fought. One blow broke her jaw, and she ceased her struggles. Just for good measure, the pirate whacked her with the butt of his gun on the
side of her head, caving in an eye socket. She lay comatose as the man ripped off her clothes and opened his trousers. The sight of her naked body and the excitement of the morning had done their work. He spread her legs and jabbed his erect penis in as his mates laughed heartily.

  When they had all had their turn, they left, slamming the door behind them.

  * * *

  USS Richard Ward was the first warship to obtain a visual sighting on Sultan of the Seas. An E-2 was a hundred miles away and had the ships on radar, so their symbols appeared on the computer-driven tactical displays of every ship in the task force, including the flagship, Chosin Reservoir.

  Sultan was proceeding south at nineteen knots, which Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington thought was probably her normal cruising speed. If she held this speed, she would make the harbor at Eyl, Somalia, roughly at dawn tomorrow. If she was going to Eyl. Toad certainly didn’t know.

  The weather was gorgeous, with just a high, thin cirrus layer diffusing the direct rays of the sun. Visibility was thirty or forty miles; wind out of the northwest off the Arabian Peninsula at five knots, a dry wind. Even the swells of the morning had dissipated until the ocean was a gentle, undulating mirror reflecting the sky.

  His staff was sorting though the message traffic from his superiors and dashing off replies. They handed him clipboards full of this stuff, which he quickly scanned and handed back.

  Washington wanted the impossible: the Sultan recaptured without the loss of a single civilian life.

  The marine Force Reconnaissance team had taken down pirates aboard several merchant ships before, a bulk carrier and a container ship. Both had small crews. The Force Recon team knocked out topside opposition, boarded, then fought their way through the ship, killing any pirates who didn’t surrender. Most of them did.

  Yet today the captured ship contained eight hundred and fifty people, literally people in every compartment, under the control of three boatloads of pirates, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, all armed, headed for a safe harbor where they would anchor and demand ransom. Don’t pay, they kill people. Board, they kill people. Pay the money and you get everyone back alive. They’ll even give you back your ship. Then, since that went so wonderfully well and the pirates all got filthy rich, they’ll recruit hundreds more pirates, buy more boats and weapons, and motor out into Pirate Alley or the great wide ocean to capture more ships and crews and passengers to hold for ransom, all over again.

  The fact that the pirates had a safe harbor to operate from and go back to was the crux of the problem, but one that wouldn’t get solved today or tomorrow, so Toad didn’t waste any time thinking about it. “Above my pay grade,” he once told his chief of staff, Flip Haducek, who was expounding on the wisdom of wiping out pirate nests.

  A real-time television picture of Sultan appeared on the monitor above the tac display. The camera was on one of the helos.

  As Toad studied it, Flip Haducek and Colonel Zakhem joined him.

  “Washington wants to approve any plan of action you decide on,” Haducek said. He wiggled the message board in his hand.

  “Gentlemen,” Toad said flatly, “my preferred course is an overwhelming show of force. Steam alongside with armed marines lining the rails of this ship and the Ward, helos and Ospreys overhead, fighters zipping past at masthead height. That is what I intend to do. When we’ve given them a good look, marines will rappel down and take the ship. They’ll be letting it all hang out. Still, it could work.”

  Zakhem nodded his concurrence. The pirates could shoot the marines on the ropes, of course. It would take guts to go down those ropes. His marines had plenty.

  “But if it doesn’t work, if they start machine-gunning captives or shooting marines, we need another plan,” the admiral continued. “I am not willing to watch those bastards sail away on the ocean blue with eight hundred and fifty captives to ransom at their leisure.”

  “A clandestine boarding by SEALs tonight,” Colonel Zakhem said. He pointed to the monitor. “Those lines dangling over the side. Those are on the grappling hooks the pirates used to board. They are still there.”

  Toad stared. The lines were difficult to see on the monitor. “We need real photos, of both sides of the ship. Blow-ups. Flip?”

  “Aye aye, sir.” He picked up a telephone. The photos had already been taken and were being processed, he was told.

  “SEALs,” the admiral whispered, staring at the thin lines on the monitor.

  “If it were dark enough, a few determined men in wet suits might be able to climb those lines or their own and get aboard unnoticed,” Zakhem mused. “After all, the pirates did it. Who knows, if SEALs get aboard, the pirates can surrender or die.”

  Toad wasn’t so optimistic. The pirates would want a shit-pot full of money for all those people, and he suspected they would fight like hell to get it. On the other hand, four or five SEALs sneaking through the ship slitting throats and tossing pirates overboard might convince the remainder they were in over their heads. Might. Or might not.

  “Colonel, you and Flip scare up some SEALs and bring me a plan.”

  The two officers left without a word.

  Toad sat staring at the monitor and tac display until his ops officer approached him.

  “We’ve rescued three pirates, sir. There was a fourth, but he had a twenty millimeter round through his abdomen and died five minutes after we pulled him out.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They are from Eyl, Somalia. Their warlord is a guy named Ragnar.”

  Ops had prepared a message for Tarkington’s signature. He read it through carefully. There was a brief description of the Sultan, projected time of arrival off the Horn of Africa, intel from the rescued pirates, projected time of arrival at Eyl, the first suitable pirate port, and so on.

  He thought if the pirates intended to cross the bar into Eyl, they would wait for dawn. They were seamen, certainly, but Sultan was not a fishing boat or pirate scow. Tod signed the message.

  He picked up his binoculars and focused them on Sultan. Tarkington made a face. Then he began cursing, silently. Ah me.

  Toad wondered what was going on aboard that ship.

  Whatever it was, the pirates had the initiative. Toad wanted it back. He wanted to force his will upon the pirates, force them to do what he wanted, which was surrender. His primary goal was to make the pirate captain realize he had no other options.

  “Every marine aboard is to be topside and on the sponsons with a rifle. We’ll make it plain-they can surrender or die.”

  He glanced at his staff. “Flip, send another Flash message to Washington, Fifth Fleet, everyone on the list. Let’s do this as an Unless Otherwise Directed. Tell them Plan A and Plan B. We will go as soon as we get the marines transferred to the Ward, and our ships in position. Make that two hours from now. Draft that and let me see the draft.”

  Haducek looked at his watch. “It’s 1130, sir. May we aim for 1430 instead?”

  “Okay. Put that in the message, 1430 local time.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Captain Haducek strode away.

  The other members of the staff discussed what had to be done and began making it happen. After another brief discussion with Colonel Zakhem, Toad personally briefed the captain of Chosin Reservoir. While they were talking, a first-class yeoman brought Toad a draft of the message dictated by Haducek. Unless Otherwise Directed, UNODIR, this is what I intend to do and when I intend to do it. Left unsaid but implicit was, If you don’t want me to do it, say so. Put yourself on record. Or let me proceed on my initiative and my responsibility.

  Toad corrected one word, signed the form and handed it back.

  When he and the Reservoir’s captain were finished, Toad called the captain of Richard Ward on a secure voice channel.

  On the Reservoir’s flight deck, marines in battle dress were lining up to board Ospreys and helicopters. Colonel Max Zakhem didn’t believe in fooling around. Neither did Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington.

  To
ad climbed out of his chair and went to the head. He had needed to go for an hour.

  * * *

  Most of the women aboard the ship were at least twice the age of the pirates, who wanted something younger. Juicier. Fortunately there were several dozen good candidates in the crew quarters. In twos and threes, they went below and assaulted some women. One of the women screamed so loudly they strangled her, and they left another bleeding badly.

  Captain Arch Penney got the news via telephone on the bridge. He turned to Mustafa al-Said, who was strutting back and forth, keeping his eye on the airplanes and helicopters that buzzed about at least a mile away from the ship.

  “Your men are raping the women. I thought you said they wouldn’t do that.”

  Mustafa’s concern showed in his face. His boss, Ragnar, had told him in no uncertain terms that he and his men must leave the women strictly alone. “We will ask for ransom, and they will demand to speak to the passengers and crew. If they report they have been raped or tortured or abused, we risk our political position.” Ragnar well knew that his lair of Eyl was only safe because the allied governments had refused, so far, to attack it. He didn’t want to give allied decision-makers a reason to change their minds.

  Ragnar had been very explicit. “We want money. Not blood. Not revenge or terror or sex or any of that nonpaying shit. Money. Money we can spend. Don’t fuck this up, Mustafa.” Those were not his exact words, of course, but close enough. “Your men can wait until they are back in Eyl, then they can have all the women they can stand. If they have money, the women of Somalia will line up to fuck them.”

  Mustafa left his two pirates who could read a compass in charge on the bridge and went below. He didn’t really care what the infidels thought of rape or his men; he cared greatly about pleasing Ragnar, who had a nasty habit of killing people who displeased him. People who thought they had a tough boss had no idea what a really tough boss looked like.

  * * *

  Radio talk-show host Mike Rosen had been using the Internet computers in the computer room just off the ship’s library when the pirates boarded the ship. He heard the shooting and the captain’s announcement. Pirates had taken the ship.