JET V - Legacy (2 page)

“Okay. Let her rip,” said Samuel, eyeing the indicator for the wireless signal strength.

“Give me a second,” Adam replied, sliding a keyboard toward him and tapping in a series of instructions.

Both men stopped what they were doing when the crack of the upstairs door slamming boomed in their headphones.

“Sounds pretty clear,” Adam whispered.

“Shhh.”

A brutal gust of wind pummeled the building with sheets of rain, interrupting their vigil as the van rocked from the force. Inside the little vehicle it sounded like someone was pounding on the roof with a jackhammer.

Murmured voices faded in and out as Adam toyed with the equipment knobs, bringing up a screen on the computer at his side and adjusting some faders on a digital filtering system. He was recording everything real time, but he also had the ability to equalize the signal and remove some of the background noise the storm introduced.

Samuel cursed when one of the two cameras went dark and then displayed static.

“Damn. The wind must have knocked it out,” he complained, eyes searching over the equipment for evidence of a malfunction inside the van.

“Great. How does this get any worse?”

“Don’t ask those kinds of questions.”

“You know what you have to do.”

Samuel nodded, resigned. He’d have to get a visual on the camera array and see if he could make out anything obvious that had gone wrong. The night had just gotten more unpleasant – it was blowing at least forty knots, and the heavy rain was peppering the van like a hailstorm.

Samuel reluctantly pushed aside the heavy curtain that separated the rear of the van from the cab and grimaced as he took in the torrent of rain cascading down the windshield. He was just turning to utter a curse to Adam when the smaller man saw a red dot play across Samuel’s face, then settle on his temple.

“Look out–” Adam screamed, but it was too late. Samuel’s head exploded as if he’d swallowed a grenade, spraying the back of the van with blood and bone, and the windshield collapsed inward as the wind caught the bullet-weakened glass and tore part of it away like a kite in a hurricane. Adam was groping for the assault rifle by his feet when another volley of rounds tore into the van, narrowly missing him. He was raising the rifle to return fire when he registered a burst of flame on the periphery of his vision, and then time stood still as an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade with a thermobaric warhead streaked through the windshield and detonated in a fireball, killing him instantly and vaporizing the interior in a molten blaze.

Pieces of the van, which was now distorted beyond recognition, had blown twenty yards into the street. When the first police arrived seven minutes later the chassis was smoldering, the gas tank having exploded when the grenade detonated, further contributing to the destruction.

Nobody who’d remained in the vicinity to answer questions had seen anything, and after an all-night investigation, the preliminary assessment was that an organized crime hit had taken place – not uncommon when territorial disputes flared up.

No one remembered the occupants of the apartment silently melting into the night, nor was the pick-up truck with the shooter noted by anyone. The carnage made the papers for two days, but after all was said and done, no perpetrators were arrested, and the event joined the hundreds of others that would remain unsolved in the ongoing war on organized crime upon which the latest administration had embarked with negligible results.

Chapter 2

Three months ago, 250 miles east of Hobyo, Somalia

Salome
’s massive bow plowed through the churning swells, the waves rolling four to six feet high in slow sets, the breeze confused and directionless. Conditions were unpredictable at best in this stretch of the western Indian Ocean, and the pre-dawn sky was inky black, with only an occasional star glimmering through the fog and no moon to speak of. The freighter’s diesel motors rumbled with a throaty roar as she surged against the prevailing wind toward her ultimate destination of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Salome
was a veteran cargo ship who’d plied the coasts of Africa, India, and Pakistan for almost two decades – grim duty, to be sure, but profitable. Her crew was a mixed bag of merchant marines from all over the world, and she was flagged in Liberia, as were many of the vessels that roamed the infamous stretch of sea, the tiny nation’s almost non-existent regulations a powerful draw that attracted a maritime register of over thirty-five hundred under its flag – eleven percent of the world’s ships.

Up on the bridge, the watchman nudged the mate with his elbow. “What do you think?” he asked, sipping at his steaming mug of coffee, eyeing the radar screen with a fatigued gaze as he stabbed at a glowing blip with a grimy finger.

“Looks like a fishing boat to me. What, maybe a sixty or seventy footer? Making all of nine knots, if that,” the mate replied.

“How far off?”

“Six miles.”

“We should wake the captain,” the watchman said, taking another draw of the strong brew he drank by the bucket, thick and black, the hotter the better.

“He’ll be up soon enough. We’ll keep an eye on it and if it gets much closer, then we can sound the alarm. At the speed it’s moving, it doesn’t pose much of a threat. Let the captain get his beauty rest, I say.”

The watchman scanned the horizon in the direction of the offending craft with a pair of binoculars, and then dropped them back onto his chest. “No lights.”

“A lot of these old scows don’t run them. Damned Chinese and Thai boats that are so old they barely float. Not a lot of money being spent on replacement bulbs. Doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“True, but still, makes you wonder. I’m thinking we rouse those two security men. Let ’em earn their keep.”

The armed guards, mercenaries from an Israeli company that specialized in maritime anti-piracy precautions, ran ten hour shifts, leaving four hours every day where the watchmen were told to wake them if anything suspicious occurred. Sighting a slow-moving fishing boat didn’t really qualify as particularly alarming, but neither man was much liked by the crew – they kept to themselves and made a big show of toting around their rifles, the only guns on the ship.

Commercial craft were historically banned from carrying weapons, but because of the spike in piracy off the eastern coast of Africa, a number of countries had changed their rules, which had introduced a new opportunity for enterprising security firms. Increasingly ships that routinely made the run hired gunmen to stave off hijacking attempts and to act as a defense against pirates, who were typically after easy targets, not gun battles; although lately, as an international naval presence had massed in an effort to curb piracy, reports had surfaced of more aggressive attacks where the pirates had engaged, using automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

The mate grunted assent as he left the bridge to wake the guards.
Salome
was cutting along at eighteen knots, and the other boat chugging through the seas at scarcely half that, so he felt no particular urgency as he wound his way down the stairs to where the security men were slumbering.

He roused the two sleeping gunmen with barely concealed delight and stood at their cabin door as they quickly pulled on clothes. Both donned Kevlar vests over their shirts and then scooped up their Kalashnikov AKM assault rifles before following him to the bridge.

“What have we got?” Ari, the taller of the two, asked the watchman.

“Doesn’t look like much.” He pointed to a bright spot on the glowing radar screen. “This guy, right here. No lights, on a heading that shouldn’t get much closer than a couple of miles. But I figured you’d want to know. Earning your keep and all. Maybe get to fire off those popguns.”

Ari ignored the jibe. His job wasn’t to get into a pissing contest with the crew. This was just another boring gig, one of hundreds of voyages he’d made, where nothing had ever happened – almost disappointing, given the buildup the company had given him when he’d applied for the position. He’d had visions of exotic ports and clashes with pirates on the high seas, not a virtually endless supply of diesel fumes and seasickness.

He looked at Barry, his partner, and grimaced.

“Not a lot to get excited about. You want to stay awake for this? I’m going to go back and try to get some more sleep. At the snail’s pace they’re moving, it’ll be like watching ice melt…”

“Sure. I agree. Won’t take two of us to keep an eye on the situation.”

Ari shook his head and trudged back to the narrow stairwell that led to the main deck level, carefully ensuring that his gun barrel pointed down at all times. Another false alarm in a long string of them. Every time a ship saw anything other than another tanker these days in the waters around Somalia, it was a fire drill – but at this point in his two-year-long career it had been a wash.

He had mixed feelings about that – some of the other men he worked with had been in firefights with pirates, and those had always ended with the attackers turning tail the second anyone shot back at them. They were opportunistic, extremely poor, and uninterested in doing battle to make their money, which was why the deterrent value of his company was undeniable. A few bursts across the bow of a pirate vessel and it would veer off in search of more benign prey. At least that’s what he’d been told, and he had no reason to doubt it.

Up on the bridge, Barry set his rifle down and moved to the coffee pot, resigned to spending the last hour of darkness staring at the screen and trying to stay awake.

~ ~ ~

Jiang Li
, a thirty-year-old steel-hulled Chinese fishing trawler, had been hijacked three weeks earlier, and the crew held aboard as the leaky tub was used as a mother ship for the pirates who had taken her without a fight. Two fast skiffs trailed the boat, towed by stout rope, and over time the fifteen Chinese crew members had grown apathetic about their lot; they weren’t paid enough to risk their lives fighting the pirates, and it was unlikely that their owner would pay much of a ransom for their return, so they were just taking it day by day as the twenty-one armed Somali gunmen kept them on the deck where they could be used as human shields if any warships approached – which, so far, none had shown any interest in doing. A multi-national coalition force had sent ships to patrol the area, but it was a vast ocean, and the sector the pirates operated in was bigger than all of Europe, making the effort largely hit or miss.

Two ebony-skinned gunmen heaved the ropes and brought the skiffs to the stern as the pilot cut power, and in a few minutes eighteen of the heavily armed fighters had loaded aboard. The target was
Salome
, a medium-sized freighter hauling cargo to the Middle East. An accomplice with internet access in Mogadishu had alerted them to its passage, and their leader had decided it was a viable target.

Salome
was operated by a prominent Israeli shipping company with offices in most major European ports, which made it an excellent candidate for ransoming – the value of the cargo alone would be worth many millions, perhaps over ten, so a ransom of a few million could be in the offing, rewarding them handsomely even after their financial backers had been paid. Pirating had become a booming cottage industry, and opportunities were now traded on an ad hoc exchange in Korfa, although the market was down since the success rate had dropped – a function of the increased military presence now patrolling the area.

The powerful outboard motors cranked to life, and a few moments later the boats were slicing through the waves, bound for where
Salome
was moving inexorably north, oblivious to the magnitude of the threat headed its way.

~ ~ ~

“Damn. Two bogies, small, just separated from the fishing boat. Looks like they’re headed straight for us,” the watchman said, eyes following the glowing dots on the screen as they moved away from the larger blip that was the Chinese fishing vessel.

“Speed?” Barry asked, standing, his heart rate accelerating at the prospect of an attack. Ribbons of red and orange were just beginning to light the sky as the sun fought its way over the horizon, and if it hadn’t been for the approaching small craft it would have been another breathtaking sunrise at sea to behold.

“Fast. At least twenty-five knots. They’re moving at a ninety-degree angle to our position, so they’ll be on top of us in just a few minutes. The fishing boat is only a couple of miles away from us now, so you can do the math.”

“Get someone to wake Ari. I’m headed down to the deck to set up a firing position. I don’t really even need them in range. Six hundred meters out I should be able to throw a few bursts their way. That should send them running,” Barry explained, grabbing his rifle from where he’d stowed it in a corner of the bridge.

“All right. Consider it done,” the mate said, rising from his swivel chair and preparing to follow him. “I’ll go get the captain, too.”

As they entered the stairwell, the mate cleared his throat. “Why don’t you shoot at them from up here, on the superstructure? Wouldn’t that give you a better position? Shooting from the highest possible point?”

“Flexibility. I want to be able to cover both sides of the ship, as well as the bow and stern. I can’t do that as easily from up top because of the railing and the configuration of the walkways – and there’s less cover.” He paused as his foot hovered over the next step. “Look. Just do me a favor and get Ari. We’ll need all the time we can get. And tell him to bring some more ammo, as well as our sidearms,” Barry snapped, perfunctorily dismissing the mate. With his first real-life pirate attack imminent, he wasn’t in the mood to play twenty questions.

Once outside, the salt wind lashing at his face, he looked around until he found a suitable spot where he could lie on the deck and fire while presenting as small a target as possible, as he’d been trained. It had been seven years since his service days, and a maritime exchange was different than firing at fighters in the desert, but the basics remained the same. A gun was a gun, even on a moving platform like a ship under way, and maintaining rigid control over your reactions was still essential, regardless of the turf.