Operation Sea Ghost (11 page)

Nolan, Gunner and the Senegals were putting on their battle-wear when she appeared. Big helmets, flak jackets, elbow and knee pads, combat boots, ammo belt, trouble light and weapons.

She didn’t say a word to them. She just looked at Nolan, expecting him to wait on her. He threw a rucksack in front of her. Inside was an extra battle suit.

“Hurry up,” Nolan told her. “We’re on a timetable.”

She took one look at the bulky combat gear and said: “I’m not wearing this stuff.”

“You are untrained, unarmed and unwelcome,” Nolan shot back at her. “There’s no way you’re going out there with us unless you’re protected to the max. End of discussion.”

She stalked off—not back to her cabin, but up to the flight deck. A heated conversation ensued, half English, half Italian, between her and the Stormos. Nolan guessed she believed the pilots were her only allies and needed their support. But the Stormos told her quite clearly only one of two things could happen: either she wore the armored suit to Gottabang or she stayed on board with them. If she refused either, they would simply turn around, take off and fly away on their own call as commanders of the airplane. Then no one would go.

She was wearing the mother of all pouts when she emerged from the flight deck. Nolan’s spirits lifted a little. Maybe an assault on her fashion sense was all they needed.

He was praying that she’d lock herself back inside her cabin—and allow them to proceed unencumbered. But no such luck. She stomped her way back up to the team and reluctantly started putting on the battle suit.

Nolan and Gunner groaned in unison. Even the Senegals were shaking their heads.

Nolan rubbed his tired eye. “What the hell have we gotten into?” he thought aloud.

It took a few extra minutes for her to get dressed. Of course, nothing fit to her liking. Everything was just too big for her, too tight, too heavy.

Even after she was in the battle suit, she couldn’t stop complaining.

“I can’t go anywhere in this thing,” she said, her voice muffled by the helmet’s mouth plate. “It’s like a suit of armor.”

“No kidding,” Nolan replied, angrily fastening it a few places in the back that she couldn’t reach.

When she was done, Gunner and the Senegals looked her up and down—then put their hands to their mouths to stop from laughing. They couldn’t help it. All encompassing helmet, thick black visor, oxygen mask. Full torso body armor with shoulder pads, elbow pads and highly armored gloves. Kevlar bottoms with padding on the knees and ankles. Thick armored “ski boots.”

She looked like a kid wearing a
RoboCop
costume.

“I will confiscate any camera that takes a picture of me besides mine!” she bellowed from behind the mask.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nolan said, pushing her to the rear of the plane. “No one here cares that much about you.”

*   *   *

TIED DOWN AT the back of the cargo bay was Alpha Squad’s next mode of transport: the RIB.

Standing for Rigid-hull Inflatable Boat, it was a combination rubber raft and speedboat designed by the British Special Air Service, the famous SAS. Jet-black and almost impossible to see at night, Whiskey had been lugging one around since they’d gone into the pirate-busting business. Now they would get to use it.

Upon inflating the RIB, they would slip out of the back of the flying boat’s large rear hatch and dip into Gottabang Bay. Then, after one last check of their equipment, the search for the
Pacific Star
would begin in earnest.

The Stormos kept the
Shin-1
’s big engines turning, just in case a quick getaway was needed. But the RIB inflated with no problems, and its powerful near-silent engine came to life right away. The squad and Emma Simms climbed in, and finally, they were off.

Gunner piloted the boat. Nolan and the five Senegals sat around the edges with Emma Simms smack in the middle. Body armor or not, the arrangement guaranteed that if the RIB was fired on, someone else would catch the bullet before her.

They were soon moving in and out of the traffic jam of ships clogging Gottabang Bay. They had to act like detectives now, looking for one vessel among many. Though some of the ships had had their names scraped from their hulls, the remaining silhouettes were fairly easy to read via the team’s night-vision scopes. Many of the ships also appeared devoid of crew. Very few had any lights burning—and all of them looked like they were barely able to stay afloat.

Nolan was trying to look in every direction at once, but there was a lot to take in. The only clue they had besides the missing ship’s name, which the pirates might have changed anyway, was that the
Pacific Star
was a combination cargo ship and fishing boat. But in this floating graveyard, where virtually every ship looked the same, that wasn’t much to go on.

The RIB was highly maneuverable and Gunner knew how to put it through its paces. Through all the swishing and shushing, though, Nolan could hear Emma Simms loudly complaining under her helmet that she was going to fall out, that they were going to capsize, or they were going to hit something and she would sink to the bottom, so heavy was her armored body suit. But everyone in the squad just ignored her.

The waterborne search took almost thirty minutes, weaving around the ghostly fleet of ships, checking their hull conditions and trying to decipher their scraped-off names. In the end it all proved fruitless. None of the vessels was named
Pacific Star
, and none of them fit the barebones description the CIA had given them.

This meant on to Plan B. Alpha Squad would have to go ashore and look for evidence of the phantom ship there.

*   *   *

THEY APPROACHED THE beach slowly, not wanting to kick up any kind of visible wake.

Though it was the dead of night, a lot of noise was coming from the shore: The idling engines of heavy cutting machines, soon to be made ready for their morning work. Static and foreign voices blasting from radios up in the workers’ shantytowns. The continuous baying of an unseen foghorn. There was so much smoke coming from the beach fires, it had settled on the shoreline like a toxic blanket. Nolan ordered everyone to connect their oxygen masks. Where they were going next, the air was not breathable.

Prior to leaving the
Shin
, Nolan told one of the Senegals that if Alpha had to go to the beach, he should pretend to stay behind to watch the RIB—and that he would try to make Emma Simms stay behind with him. But as soon as they made it to shore, she was the first to jump from the boat, ruining the plan. She had her camera out and was demanding someone take pictures of her. When no one would, she stormed off, marching up the beach alone, in full view of anyone who might be looking in their direction.

Nolan ran after her, practically tackling her and pulling her back into the shadows. “This place is lousy with people who won’t mind shooting any of us—and not with a camera,” he told her sternly. “Why can’t you just stay with the goddamn boat?”

She waved him off. “Because I got this goddamn suit on,” she snapped back at him. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

He kept hold of her arm, though. “If you move more than two feet away from me,” he told her, “I’ll shoot you myself.”

Hiding the RIB in some shore vegetation, by this time the rest of the squad had caught up to them. Nolan told them to check their weapons and their breathing masks. Then they began their search of the grimy beach.

They made their way slowly at first, moving carefully among the heaps of cut steel and burning trash. The beach reminded Nolan of a battlefield that war had passed by. The carcasses of dozens of ships lay tossed about as if discarded by some giant hand. Some were in pieces; others had yet to be broken. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. There were also hundreds of tools scattered about—sledgehammers, huge hacksaws, acetylene torches. Apparently once quitting time arrived, all of Gottabang’s 20,000 workers just dropped whatever they were using at the moment and walked away.

All this clutter, plus the smoke and the night, made moving around the beach slow and difficult. Nolan soon realized they had to split up. Two Senegals would search the water’s edge along the southern part of the beach. Two more would take the northern end. Gunner and the fifth Senegal would take the midsection. Being stuck with Emma Simms, Nolan would search the area closest to where the RIB was hidden.

He was hoping this would be the safest part of the mile-long beach to check. Because it was far from the cutting yards and the workers’ shantytowns, it seemed the place where they were least likely to run into Gottabang’s security thugs.

Once the squad dispersed, Nolan and Emma Simms set out, staying close to one another but not talking, which was fine with him. They passed dozens of pools of discarded fuel, oil and bloody-red lubricants. The beach was so polluted, the sand was luminescent green in some parts, so soaked through it was with toxic chemicals. Sky-high piles of insulation and mountains of ship’s wall paneling soon surrounded them. Random jagged pieces of metal, lit by countless fires, big and small, were everywhere.

They reached an area jam-packed with giant pieces of broken ships. Bows, sterns, midsections. Some were cut neatly in sections, others were torn and jagged as if they’d been blown apart. It was like walking through a city where the streets contained block upon block of nightmarish buildings. These pieces towered over their heads, blotting out the night sky as effectively as the ever-present cloud of toxic smoke.

They moved along like this for nearly a half hour, Nolan checking for a ship name on every stern they came to. Every few minutes he would feel his sat-phone click twice, the signal from the other search teams checking in. But nothing beyond those two clicks meant they had no good news.

One part of Nolan was actually hoping they
wouldn’t
find the remains of the ship on the beach. It was pretzel logic, but if the ship was not here, then that meant it was still out there, somewhere. If it
had
been broken already, then the contents and the pirates would be scattered by now.

Besides, if they didn’t find evidence of the missing vessel here, they could leave quickly, dump Emma Simms, and resume the search somewhere else.

*   *   *

NOLAN WAS CERTAIN the recon mission was a bust when he returned to the water’s edge and saw the other search parties all heading in his direction.

Each group reported the same thing: not even the barest clue of the
Pacific Star
had been found.

So much for Plan B.

Now they had to return to the RIB and get out of there. But when Nolan turned around to tell this to Emma Simms, she was nowhere to be seen.

“Where the fuck did she go?” he bellowed through his oxygen mask.

They fanned out immediately and began looking for her.

All kinds of thoughts were going through Nolan’s mind now, not the least of which was that she could still get them all killed. But then after running about 100 feet back into the canyon of broken ships, he suddenly found her.

She was standing at the back of a severed stern they’d missed somehow, looking at the name painted below the intact railing.

She saw him coming and simply pointed up.

Nolan adjusted his nightscope and read the name.

Pacific Star …

She handed him her camera.

“Make sure you get my good side,” she said.

10

SHADEY HADARI WAS Gottabang’s Master Cutter.

He’d been employed at the breaking yard since it opened nearly twenty years before. This was substantial longevity as the Gottabang operation averaged one death, and usually a dozen mangling injuries, per day. Due to its outrageously hazardous working conditions, people looked up to Hadari as a sort of holy man, simply because he’d lasted so long at the most dangerous job in the world.

All these years of work had taken a toll on him, though. He was missing his left arm up to the elbow. He had just two fingers and a thumb on his right hand. His right foot was devoid of toes; his left ear was gone, as was all his hair, including his eyebrows and eyelashes. He had exactly two teeth left in his mouth.

He needed the help of a cane to walk and an ancient hearing aid to carry on a conversation. Though he was just thirty-eight years old, he looked twice that age at least.

He resided in a shack that was close to the beach and set away from the shantytowns where the rest of the cutting crews lived. Though built like the others, of wood and leftover ship paneling, the shack’s location was considered a perk, the only reward for Hadari’s long service to the multimillionaires who owned the ship-breaking operation. Its location was ideal only because most of the toxic smoke that rose from the beach did not usually blow in his direction.

Still, Hadari rarely slept, so numerous were his ailments. That’s why he was wide awake when Benja, his second cousin’s half-nephew, came to his shack in the dead of night asking if they could talk.

Benja was just twenty years old, but he, too, was covered with scars and bubbled skin, the result of coming in contact with so many harmful chemicals. He’d worked at Gottabang just six years, but in the day-to-day operations, he was considered a senior man as well.

Hadari motioned him inside, indicating he should close the rickety door behind him so no rats would get in.

“Visitors are here to talk to you,” Benja told Hadari. “They are looking for a missing ship.”

Hadari did not understand. Visitors? No one ever visited Gottabang.

“I found them, or I should say they found me, down at the water’s edge,” Benja went on nervously. “They want to know about a certain ship that came here to be chopped. I told them you were the wisest man on the beach. That if anyone knew, you would.”

But Hadari still didn’t understand. He’d been hit on the head by various objects so many times over the years, some things just didn’t register. He was still stumped by Benja’s news that visitors had come to the beach.

“I don’t want to talk to anyone,” he finally replied, his voice raspy and barely above a whisper. “If they are looking for a ship, let them float around in the bay, searching for its name. If it’s not here, let them walk among the junk piles on shore and see if they recognize what’s left of it.”