Black Site (2 page)

But in real-world situations, the LRAD had been little more than an annoying noisemaker.

“That’s not all.”

“I turn the hoses on at night to slow down boarding attempts from the side. I check to make sure the antipirate fencing is in place. Sixty minutes’ work max, and work that a well-trained chimp could do. C’mon, Pete, this job is a joke.”

“You are the one making it a joke. You should be thankful for a paycheck. Six months ago you were selling camping gear in a mall in North Carolina. Now you’re a well-paid private security officer on a container ship crossing the Gulf of Aden. You
did
read the threat assessments I faxed you in Naples, didn’t you?”

Raynor stifled a hiccup with the back of his arm. Brought the phone back to his ear. “I know about the threat. There are pirates in the gulf, and they are assholes, but statistically speaking, there is less than a one-in-three-hundred chance we’ll get hit. Since NATO began patrolling the Gulf of Aden, attacks are down. And even if we do get hit, it’s not like I can do anything about it. I’m a damn stowaway. I don’t have any authority and I don’t have any weapons.”

“Our client’s rules of engagement are strict, I can acknowledge that, but—”

“Rules of engagement? Their rules of engagement are ‘Don’t engage.’ They won’t let me do anything but handle the LRAD if we get hit, or handle the ransom transfer if we get boarded. The captain could do that as well as I could.”

“Kolt, there is half a billion dollars’ worth of cargo on that ship, and there is a poorly kept secret in the maritime protection industry that you should know. Jorgensen Cargo Lines, like many others, hires us to staff every ship making the Gulf of Aden run with a security officer purely for the reduction in insurance premiums. They are saving money by just having you sit on your ass and work on your tan. If you get boarded you just tell the guy with the biggest towel on his head that Jorgensen will wire ransom to any bank he specifies. Your job is crucial, it is easy, and it only requires you staying sober. Can you do that for me, Kolt?”

“Yeah, Pete.” Kolt drank bourbon straight from the bottle now. He liked Pete Grauer. Appreciated the ex-Ranger colonel giving him security work when no one else would return his calls. Even if it was a piss-poor contract on a smelly ship cruising back and forth in the middle of nowhere.

Grauer continued. “Make a few more runs on the freighters, show me you can keep yourself together, and I’ll find some cushy static work for you somewhere closer to home.”

“Thanks, Pete.”

“How’s your back doing?”

“Aches a bit. Not too bad.”

“You’re damn lucky to be alive after what you went through. You do recognize that, don’t you?”

Kolt thought back to a moment in the not too distant past, and the flood of emotions that filled his booze-altered brain made him feel anything
but
lucky. Still, he replied, “Yes, sir.”

“You doing your exercises?”

Kolt gulped the bourbon again, leaned back in his bunk. “You bet.”

“How’s the crew treating you?”

“Other than the captain, they are fine. Norwegian officers, Filipino deckhands. My only incident so far was when one of the crew tried to turn in another for having a pistol on board. I talked to the culprit and he showed me the gun. It’s an old pot metal .22 revolver he keeps for rats.”

“Did you confiscate the weapon?”

“Hell no. This tin can is infested. I’d let him keep a belt-fed .50 cal in his bunk if he’d use it to assassinate rats.”

Pete chuckled. “Okay. We’ll let that one slide. Call me if you have any trouble.”

Raynor snorted. “Statistically speaking, there is a one-in-three-hundred chance you’ll hear from me.”

“One more thing.”

“Sir?”

Kolt listened to the cracks and pops of the satellite connection for several seconds. Grauer was a man rarely at a loss for words. “I understand …
everyone
understands that what you’ve been through these past three years has been tough. I can’t imagine the guilt you deal with. But … no matter what happened, you need to turn the page and get past it. Those guys are gone, and your feeling sorry for yourself will not bring any of them back. You need to forgive yourself, and you need to pull those shoulders back, lift that chin up, and move forward. You have a life to live.”

“Yes, sir.” Raynor’s VA shrink had been saying much the same thing for most of three years.

Grauer’s tone changed a measure. From disappointed but empathetic father to taciturn commanding officer. “And I have a business to run. I can’t have you causing problems with the captain. That’s a lucrative contract.”

“I understand.”

“I expect the same professionalism from you that I got each and every day you served under me.”

Raynor sat up straighter. He could not help it. Fifteen years in the military had created a Pavlovian response to such a commanding tone of voice. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now, Major, put down the bottle. Clean yourself up. And no more fuckups.”

Kolt looked to the near-empty bottle in his hand. “Yes, sir.”

Grauer terminated the call.

Raynor dropped the phone and with it his shoulders. He rubbed the sting from his eyes, leaned forward on his bunk to stretch his aching back. He was hungry, filthy, sick from the booze, angry at himself for falling so far. He used to be someone, he knew it, and it sickened him to think about what he’d let himself become.

He’d been an Army Ranger, an officer, and then a member of Delta, the most elite fighting unit in the world.

But all that had ended three years ago.

Kolt shrugged, shook away the memories that haunted him, shook away just enough of the self-loathing to stand, and stepped into his sandals. He headed out the door and down to the galley to make himself a sandwich.

*   *   *

Five minutes later Kolt Raynor sat alone in the galley. He ate bread with cheese spread, wondered if he would vomit again. He felt queasy, like the room was moving, and he put his hands flat on the metal table to steady himself. His plate slid to the right, as did several other items in the room. He felt it now, unmistakable—it was not his nausea, and it was not his imagination. The ship was turning hard to port, still at full power. He knew they were far from land, it was broad daylight, and he therefore could not imagine why the captain was executing such a dramatic maneuver. There was no one around to explain why—all hands were working in other parts of the freighter. He grabbed a hunk of white bread and left the galley, climbed the stairs to the outside. He was one floor above the main deck, and he started for the stairs to go up to the control room. A middle-aged Filipino crewman in a tan jumpsuit and a red hard hat climbed a steep ladder to his level and ran past him, his thick rubber boots banging the cleated metal surface of the deck.

“What is it?” This man, Kolt knew, spoke only Tagalog, but he was able to convey a simple message.

“Pirates!”

Kolt stood there, said, “No shit?” through a lump of bread in his mouth.

TWO

Raynor didn’t believe him. He kept chewing his bread as he climbed another steep flight of stairs to B Deck, two levels above the main container deck. He looked off the starboard side, out at the ocean.

Nothing.

He moved around to the port side of the superstructure, more curious than anxious. The ship had stopped its dramatic turn, and again it shot straight and true through the water. Just behind the ship, off the port side and well within its wake, he saw three small boats. Twelve-footers, fast movers, each full of men. He estimated fifteen in total, some black, some Arab. Most had AK-47 or AK-74 rifles, though he saw at least one RPG launcher. The small craft bobbed up and down, closed confidently on the massive ship.

“I’ll be damned.” They were too close for the LRAD, and Raynor had no time to get to the fire hoses.

These men would board the ship.

Raynor had already failed.

Though the pirates looked ominous enough in their turbans and with their chests full of rifle magazines, Kolt had studied the modus operandi of Somali coast hijackings, and he knew there was little chance anyone would get hurt in the transaction to come. Jorgensen Shipping would pay—these guys would know that already. Despite a few highly publicized violent clashes between pirates and naval forces in the Gulf of Aden, the vast majority of incidents turned out to be little more than a “taxing,” where the gang would board the ship and require payment to be wired for the ship to pass through the waters.

Hardly the high drama of movies and TV shows.

Raynor thought about going back to the cabin to change into his uniform, clothing more representative of an agent of the shipping company. But he decided against it. Getting dressed up for a meeting with half-naked African pirates would just add to the absurdity of the moment.

The gunmen began boarding the ship with rope ladders hanging from long poles while Kolt made his way down the stairs and across the long deck. He’d tossed his bread in a garbage can, and he walked calmly with his arms to his sides. From a hundred yards away he saw several of the deckhands standing around near the pirates, even helping them aboard. Surely some of these guys had been in hijackings before: they knew the protocol. There was no time to get down to the citadel, the safe room several decks down in the bowels of the ship, so the deckhands just did their best to make friends with the men now in control. The Norwegian officers were nowhere in sight, maybe racing down to the citadel, though the gunmen at the bow would probably beat them there.

Wherever the Norwegians were, one thing was certain: they were leaving the negotiating to Raynor.

This was good news, actually, as Kolt knew his breath was ripe with liquor, and though he’d certainly been drunker at other times on this cruise, he was nowhere near sober at the moment. He decided he’d work with the pirates directly and stay as far away from the captain as possible. Captain Thomasson was not exactly Kolt’s biggest fan, as evidenced by his tattletale phone call to Pete Grauer.

As more and more of the shirtless pirates began filling the deck in front of him, Kolt was surprised to see some of the bandits angrily pushing and shoving the Filipinos. They lined them up near the bow, yanked off their hard hats, and put them on one another’s heads. Raynor continued to advance, but something inside him registered danger, something in the movements, something in the mannerisms of the attackers.

Kolt stopped in his tracks. The aggression showed by a few of these boy-men did not sync with what Raynor had been told about the standard operating procedure of a typical Gulf of Aden takedown. The gesticulations of one young Somali, perhaps the leader, were especially curious. His wide white eyes and screams at the Filipinos seemed wild and animal-like. He shoved men to the ground, hit them over the head with the butt of his rifle, kicked them while they squirmed on their backs on the hot metal deck.

Raynor quickly knelt behind a coil of ropes at the edge of a container bay, not forty yards from the melee. The sudden movement made his stomach roll and his body weight sway on his rubbery legs.

From this distance he could plainly hear the pirate leader. “I am Abdiwali. I am in charge of ship now! Where is captain?” the young man screamed in English. No one said anything. He pushed a young crew member toward the ship’s tower to fetch him. Then, with a wave of his hand, he sent four of his men off in different directions, presumably to round up the officers and anyone else on board. As they moved out, the leader fired a half magazine into a yellow shipping container just over the heads of the cowering crew.

The American private security contractor did not know what to do. His job, on paper anyway, would have him walk toward the leader right now, assure him Jorgensen Shipping was ready to work together with their good friends the Somalis to come to some reasonable agreement on the tariff necessary to allow this freighter to continue on through these waters with its full complement of cargo and crew.

But Raynor had a very bad feeling about this, and the last thing he was going to do at the moment was saunter up to the pirates with a smile on his face and declare himself in charge.

Kolt turned, still in a low crouch, and ran.

*   *   *

The teenage Filipino deckhand sat on his tiny lower bunk on G Deck. In his hand he cradled the rusty revolver he’d bought in port in Athens to keep the largest rats at bay. He heard the crack of rapid-fire gunshots several levels below him on the main deck. He’d never fired the weapon in his hands, never even opened the cylinder to check the status of the ammunition that came with it.

The young man shook from head to toe. This was his first experience with pirates. He’d been told by his crewmates that there was nothing to fear, but the young man was simple, anxious by nature, and quite reasonably afraid of guns pointed in anger by shouting men. He began near convulsions as running footsteps approached from down the hall. His door latch clicked, and he raised the tiny revolver awkwardly.

“Walter, Walter, it’s okay.”

It was the American, the long-haired security man who stayed in his cabin all day and smelled of drink. The man who’d come to look at his gun on the third day out of Naples but with a chuckle had allowed him to keep it after learning why he’d bought it, made Walter promise to kill a rat for him someday.

Walter lowered the pistol with an audible sigh of relief.

“I need to borrow your gun.”

The young Filipino held it out in his quaking hand. The American looked determined, confident. He took the weapon, spun it nimbly on a finger, slid forward a catch and dropped the cylinder, pulled out a round and held it up to the light. In under three seconds he’d put it all back together again, slipped the revolver under his undershirt in the small of his back, and turned to go back into the hall.

Walter called out to him. “Mr. Kolt! There are many pirates with big machine guns. You have only five little bullets. Five little bullets will not stop them.”

The American leaned back into the cabin. The eyes that had watered with the effects of liquor for the past week now glinted sharp and bright with purpose. “No. But five little bullets just might buy me one of those big machine guns.”