Operation Sea Ghost (12 page)

Benja fidgeted a bit. “They have done that, uncle, with only partial results. They are pressed for time and they feel they shouldn’t really be here in the first place.”

“And if they are outsiders, then they are right,” Hadari shot back at him. “So why did you bring them to me?”

Benja replied by taking something out of his shirt pocket. It was a hundred-dollar bill, the equivalent of a year’s pay for him.

“Because they gave me this,” he said. “And they said they’d give you even more, if you would talk to them.”

Hadari’s eyes went wide at the sight of the bill.

“Well, then bring them in, you fool!” he roared. “Why do you delay?”

Alpha Squad squeezed itself into the tiny shack a moment later.

Hadari’s expression said it all. This was not what he’d been expecting. He’d assumed the “visitors” were just some steamer bums looking for their lost wreck—rich steamer bums, but bums nevertheless. These people were soldiers, dressed in battle armor and carrying enormous weapons.

“My God, are you Americans?” Hadari asked them.

“We’re working for Americans,” Nolan corrected him.

“Not those cursed environmentalists, I hope?” Hadari said.

Nolan emphatically shook his head no. “Not a chance.”

“Is that a woman with you?” Hadari asked, looking at the heavily armored Emma Simms.

“She’s just along for the ride,” Nolan said, hastily pushing her to the rear of the group. He couldn’t imagine what would happen if word got out that the world’s most famous actress was here, in the worst place on earth.

Hadari looked her up and down again, but bought the explanation.

“You people lost a ship?” he asked them in creaky English.

“We are looking for one, yes,” Nolan replied. “We know it’s already been broken.”

“Then you really haven’t lost it,” Hadari said with a toothless smile.

“What we need is information on it,” Nolan said. “We think pirates were involved in bringing it here. Can you help us?”

Hadari hesitated. Talking to the Americans alone could get him severely punished, if not killed, by Gottabang’s brutal overseers. Adding the topic of pirates would only seal a painful death.

But Nolan had assumed as much, so he pulled out a wad of cash—his best weapon of all—and peeled off a hundred-dollar bill.

He stuffed it in Hadari’s ragged shirt pocket.

“This is for your trouble,” Nolan told him. “For starters…”

Hadari considered the money for a moment and then yelled to his half-nephew. “Get outside and keep a watch out. If you see any guards coming, you must tell us before you run away like a little child. Do you understand?”

Benja understood. He disappeared out the front door and took up station just outside the little shack.

“Now, we can talk,” Hadari said. “There
was
a ship that came in here late yesterday. And yes, it had a crew of pirates—they called themselves the Tangs. The whole thing was very hush-hush, though. Their ship went to the head of the line of those waiting to come up to the beach.

“Our men tore it down in just a matter of hours. The big boss put every available person on it. It ceased looking anything like itself within the first hour.”

“What about the cargo it was carrying?” he asked Hadari.

Hadari nodded slowly. “It is so unusual that a ship arrives here still bearing cargo. When one does, it’s a bit of news. And yes, this ship was full of guns and something else.”

Nolan got excited. “What was the ‘something else?’”

But Hadari just shook his head. “Something strange, very unusual. But at least to me, something unknown. Before the ship was cracked, the pirates made arrangements to transfer their guns and this unusual thing to another ship. Something along the lines of a seagoing tug, I believe. Pirates favor such boats, especially if they are on the run, because they tend to blend in.”

Hadari lit a cigarette. “What is it that you’re really looking for then? The guns or the unusual thing?”

Nolan took off his helmet and rubbed his tired eye.

“The ‘unusual thing,’” he replied wearily.

Hadari used his cane to tap him twice on the shoulder. It was almost a fatherly gesture even though they were close to the same age.

“You are looking in the wrong place,” Hadari said. “Whatever the ‘unusual thing’ is, it’s gone from here by now.”

Nolan peeled off two more hundreds. He passed them to Hadari, whose eyes welled up at the sight of the money.

“Thank you, sir,” Nolan told him.

“Good luck in your quest,” Hadari started to say … but he was interrupted by Benja bursting through the door,

“The security guards are coming!” he said breathlessly.

“How many?” Hadari asked anxiously.

“At least twenty,” Benja replied. “They have their machine guns and machetes. They might be heading for the Black Hole.”

Then as predicted, Benja ran away.

“Go…” Hadari told Nolan and company urgently. “Out the back door and through the worker’s settlements. Make your way back to the beach from there. But don’t stop for anything—no matter what you see!”

*   *   *

SUDDENLY, THEY WERE running.

Gunner was up front. Then came Emma Simms, the Senegals still in a protective formation around her. Nolan was bringing up the rear.

In their previous line of work as special operators for Delta Force, Nolan and Gunner had stolen into many unfriendly places, gathered intelligence and then gotten out, sometimes clean and smooth, sometimes with an army of bad guys on their heels. They excelled in both means of escape, but never with an uninvited guest along.

As soon as they went out the back of Hadari’s shack, they tumbled down a hill and found themselves on the edge of a massive slum. This was the Gottabang workers’ shantytown. It was a horrible sight, thousands of decrepit hovels stretching for as far as Nolan’s eye could see. Most were made of tin sheeting and cardboard, or leftover materials from the broken ships. They were crowded together in conditions that seemed impossible to support even the lowest of animal life, never mind humans. Yet, here they were.

The stink was unbelievable, even through the breathing masks. There was no sanitation here, no running water, certainly no electricity. Trash and excrement were everywhere. Even worse, the smoke from the toxic fires burning on the beach nearby hung over the slum like a cloud that refused to blow away. Animals—small dogs, cats, rats, chickens, snakes and some unidentifiable—scattered or slithered away as Alpha ran past.

Then there were the people. Nolan saw them only as eyes, staring out of the shadows, watery, frozen,
unaffected
as Alpha went splashing on by. With weapons pointing in all directions, night-vision goggles, heavy body armor and oversized Fritz helmets giving them an otherworldly appearance, Nolan would have thought, in the heat of the moment, these people would have shown some emotion: fright, wonder, amusement.

Something …

But they all looked dead inside.

Nolan could hear Emma Simms’s muffled voice screaming out complaints throughout this dash. They were moving too fast. The body armor was hurting her knees. The smell was making her sick. She was going to catch some disease because the people here were
looking
at her.

Truth was, had she not been with them, Alpha would have been able to move a lot quicker.

Finally Nolan shouted an order and the Senegals on either side of her, reached under her arms and began half carrying her, half dragging her.

This did not stop her from complaining, though. She began yapping faster and more virulently than before.

They were totally unfamiliar with the lay of the land; all Nolan knew was they were heading north, which was the general direction of where the Shin was waiting. He’d looked behind every few seconds to see if anyone was chasing them, but saw no one.

It took Alpha five minutes of flat-out running but Nolan finally spotted the other edge of the slum terminating at the base of a sandy hill. Beyond, he could see the water and the waiting Shin.

If they could just make it over that hill …

*   *   *

GUNNER WAS THE first to reach the top of the rise.

Even with all the confusion going on around them, Nolan clearly heard his colleague cry out. Not in pain, but in surprise.

The Senegals went over next, two carrying Emma Simms between them. They, too, cried out and came to a halt. Seconds later, Nolan scrambled up the crest—and he stopped cold as well, finally seeing what had frozen the others in their tracks.

It was another slum, much smaller, and separated from the one they’d just run through. Here, the shacks were clustered in a rough circle with a sewage ditch splitting it down the middle. But the shacks themselves looked more like cages. Most were fashioned out of cargo crates only two or three feet high.

It was obvious there was no running water here either, no electricity, no sanitation facilities. And, if anything, the stink was even more overwhelming, the conditions more putrid. It made the shantytown Alpha had just passed through look luxurious by comparison.

The Black Hole …

That’s what Hadari’s nephew had called it.

At first, though, Nolan thought the place was empty, only because he couldn’t believe anyone could actually live in a place like this.

But then he started seeing faces in the blackness. They looked especially eerie through his nightscope. They seemed to be floating in space at first. Initially a few pairs, then a few more. Then a dozen, then several dozen.

Gunner was the first to take out his flashlight and shine it into the center of the camp. What they saw was revolting.

There were about a hundred people here, staring out from the crates.

Auschwitz …

That was the first word that came to Nolan’s mind. These weren’t humans looking back at him as much as they were collections of bones wrapped in loose skin. They were emaciated beyond belief. Sunken eyes, sunken stomachs. Loose teeth. Many had lost their hair.

More grisly, though, many also bore the marks of being beaten—with fists or sticks, and maybe even slashed with machetes. Their wounds were infected and some still running with blood. It was also apparent that just about all these people were women and girls, with only a handful of males mixed in.

That’s when another word came to Nolan:
Untouchables
. Those people at the bottom of India’s caste system, people traditionally forced into the lowest kind of labor and rigidly demonized on the subcontinent.

Just what they were doing here at Gottabang also became apparent. There was a mountain of twisted pipes at one end of the Black Hole, barrels of sickly yellow powder at the other. All of the pipes had been taken from the broken ships, all of them were coated with the yellow insulation material. These people scraped the insulation from the pipes and then separated the two.

The problem was that many of the ships broken here were so old, their insulation materials almost always contained asbestos or some other equally hazardous substance.

So these people weren’t just hungry and mistreated by having the worst jobs at Gottabang, they were ghastly sick as well.

“I can’t take this,” Gunner cried out. It was too much for all of them. “We gotta get out of here.…”

But at that moment Alpha heard another sound. One that was all too familiar.

Gunfire.

Suddenly tracer bullets were flying all around them, coming from all directions.

Then came the sound of explosions, and bright flashes lighting up the appallingly smoky night.

Alpha Squad hit the dirt, dragging Emma Simms down with them. Nolan looked up to see the trails of high-caliber tracer ammunition going right over his head. And with each second those streaks of light were coming closer to them. It was clear. Gottabang’s notorious security forces had found them.

But everyone kept their cool—or at least the experienced members of the squad did. All her bullshit and bravado gone, Emma Simms was screaming through her battle helmet, absolutely terrified to suddenly be in the middle of yet another gunfight.

Nolan took stock of the situation. The incoming fire was unfocused and random, so he knew that whoever was shooting at them didn’t have them locked in, at least not yet.

On the far side of the Black Hole was a high sand dune, and beyond that was the sea. Even if the squad were unable to retrieve the RIB, if they reached the water, they would be able to summon the waiting
Shin
close to shore and get out that way. So, Nolan started the squad moving again.

They splashed their way through the center of the Black Hole, the sullen lifeless eyes seeming to burn right through them. Most of the gunfire was going by right over their heads, yet none of the Untouchables even flinched. To be shot, or not shot, didn’t seem to make a difference to them. They were dead to it all.

Nolan tried not to look at them as he rushed by, once again bringing up the rear, but it was impossible. He’d been to a lot of bizarre places in his career—but he’d never seen anything like this.

The squad finally made it to the top of the dune, the Senegals depositing the still-screaming Emma Simms face first in the sand and holding her there.

But then came something else.

Another noise. Mechanical. Whirring, yet also like a great gust of wind.

Was that a helicopter?

Nolan had heard that the goons who guarded this awful place might have a couple civilian copters converted to gunships. But this didn’t sound exactly like a helicopter. It seemed like something else.

But whatever it was, it was coming their way.

They’d just started moving to the other side of the dune when the dark object appeared above them. There was so much smoke, and so much tracer fire going over their heads, it was hard to see exactly what it was.

“Son of a bitch,” Nolan whispered, trying to make it out through the smoke and gunfire. This was the last thing they needed.

Actually, the
second
last thing.

Because at that moment Emma Simms decided to freak out for real.