Operation Sea Ghost (9 page)

The important thing was, if such a deal could be struck between the pirates and those owners, then the ship in question would be moved to the front of the line and would cease to exist in a matter of hours.

*   *   *

THE CIA AGENT listened intently. Southwest Asia was not in his purview, but he’d heard of the notorious ship-breaking operations at Chittagong in Bangladesh and Arang in southern India.

“New ones opened up in Pakistan and Turkey in just the past year,” Nolan told him. “It’s the same situation at all of them. A few people make a lot of money by using near-slave labor and polluting a piece of the planet.”

“So much for being ‘green,’” the agent said.

“Only the money is green,” Twitch interjected.

Nolan went on: “The pirates realize the stolen ship has more than those weapons on board, but they’ll also want to cover their tracks. The people who run Gottabang are corrupt as hell. They’ll have no problem breaking the hijacked ship, no questions asked.”

“Let’s say your scenario is correct,” the agent said. “What will they do with the Z-box?”

Nolan replied. “Before that phone call just now, I would have said that maybe they’d make like old-time pirates and bury it with those M-16s someplace. Or maybe they’d try to unload it on to the crooks at Gottabang. But now, contacting those ransom brokers and people in Monte Carlo? They’ve got to be trying to sell it for big bucks.”

“But how can we find out for sure?” the agent asked.

“First thing is to find the pirates,” Nolan replied. “And that means getting to Gottabang fast. Maybe we can beat them there. But even if we don’t, we can find out if they’ve been sniffing around and that will at least let us zero in on their location. And that sure beats looking all over the globe for them.”

The agent was growing very anxious.

“Well, all this means you guys got to get cracking,” he said. “And I mean, immediately.”

*   *   *

HE LEFT THEM with two sat-phones and a business envelope holding his secure number and the code word.

The agent then retreated to the silver helicopter, looking more disheveled than before. The copter took off and, as it gained a little height, it swung back over the mega-yacht. Flying low and slow, the team was surprised to see one of the pilots was indeed taking photos. He had a camera sticking out the cockpit window and was snapping pictures of the top deck.

Once the copter had departed, only then did the team get serious about planning their new mission. From the start, they knew it wouldn’t be easy.

“It means we’ll have to split up,” Nolan said. “The time element demands it. Half of us will have to go to Monte Carlo, while the other half goes to Gottabang.”

There was murmured agreement around the table.

“But the question is, how?” Nolan added. “Those places are about two thousand miles in opposite directions. That’s way beyond the range of our copters, without a hundred refuelings, that is.”

“Even on a fast ship, it would still take us days to get to Monte Carlo,” Gunner said, adding, “And it isn’t like you can fly commercial to Gottabang.”

It seemed like a huge problem.

“So, how are we going to do it then?” Twitch asked.

At that moment they heard another voice. A female voice. It was coming from right above them, not five feet away, on the bridge deck, the highest point on the yacht.

“For God’s sake, tell them they can use the seaplanes if they’ll just stop yapping down there. The tone of their voices is stressing out my epidermis.…”

Nolan just looked at the others, stunned.

The voice unquestionably belonged to Emma Simms.

And this meant only one thing: she’d been up above them the whole time, sunbathing—and listening to everything.

“Well,” Gunner said dryly. “Now we know what the spooks were taking pictures of.”

*   *   *

A MINUTE LATER, an elderly man in a flowing white gown and a gray beard climbed down off the bridge. He looked like a character from the Old Testament. He was Emma Simms’s on-call shaman. They’d seen him at the party.

He approached the team, gleaming wide smile in place.

“You know in our business we shoot people who eavesdrop on private conversations,” Gunner told him.

The man smiled even wider. “And in my business, people are smart enough to keep their voices down and be discreet.”

The team was mortified. Here they were laughing at the CIA for their fake-hijacking-gone-wrong fuckup, and they themselves had just committed one of the biggest rookie mistakes possible: assuming they were out of earshot of everybody.

“But let’s not dwell on negatives,” the shaman went on. “As it turns out, my dear friend Emma has already arranged for two seaplanes to ferry some of our guests to the mainland. Once they are free, you can have use of them for as long as needed.”

He pulled a BlackBerry from his robe and showed them a photograph of the planes in question.

“Will these do?” he asked.

The team looked at the photo and was shocked again. It was an image of two P-1 Shin Meiwas. Originally built by the Japanese military for antisubmarine duty, the more commonly called Shin was one of the world’s last modern amphibian aircraft. It was a large plane, 108 feet from front to back with a wingspan almost as long. Though powered only by four propellers, it could fly nearly five miles high while cruising at a respectable 230 knots. Most important, the Shin had an unrefueled range of nearly 2,500 miles.

It could hardly be called a seaplane, though. A more apt description was “flying boat.”

But whatever the size, a couple Shins would certainly solve Whiskey’s problem. It’s just that they were coming from the most unlikely source.

And that made them highly suspicious.

“What’s the catch?” Twitch asked the shaman directly.

The man smiled again. In fact, he never stopped smiling.

“My good friend Emma is merely appreciative of your assistance yesterday, that’s all,” he said diplomatically while retreating back toward the bridge. “Besides, ‘why does
everything
have to have a catch?’”

*   *   *

THE PAIR OF
Shins
arrived thirty minutes later.

Between a shuttle service of private helicopters and the two flying boats, the revelers were off the yacht by midafternoon, all without so much as a good-bye wave from their very famous friend.

Whiskey spent the time planning their operation. Basically, they were facing two separate missions: an armed recon to Gottabang, and an undercover intelligence-gathering mission to Monte Carlo. So, splitting up
did
make the most sense. But who would go where?

After some discussion, it was agreed that Nolan and Gunner would make up “Alpha Squad.” They would fly to Gottabang in the first Shin and hopefully find evidence that the pirates were there or had been recently.

Meanwhile, Batman and Twitch would become “Beta Squad.” They would take the second Shin to Monte Carlo, the other end of this trans-world puzzle, and snoop around, trying to figure out who the pirates called in the prestigious playground of the wealthy and how they might be connected to the Z-box.

The only hiccup was the matter of Batman’s mental state. Nolan was able to talk to him privately late in the morning when the others went below for coffee. While Batman had just about convinced Nolan that he was back among the living, and that whatever happened the night before was already ancient history, the one-handed copter pilot didn’t squawk when Nolan suggested he honcho the more subtle, “Beta” side of the plan.

“You’ll look better in Monte Carlo than I will,” Nolan told him.

*   *   *

THE ATTACK COPTER they’d used in the hostage rescue, one of two the team owned, would not play a role in the upcoming mission. Whiskey arranged to have it ferried back to Aden by the same pilot who’d flown the Bell helicopter during the attack on the pirate base.

When the Bell arrived on the mega-yacht to drop off the ferry pilot, it was also carrying another important component of Team Whiskey: The Senegals. The five seagoing soldiers of fortune, employees of the team’s parent company, Kilos Shipping, had been a vital cog in Whiskey’s success. But because their names were so hard to pronounce, the team just called them the Senegals, after their country of origin. Preferring a day of rest to attending a poofy party, the five West Africans had stayed in Aden after participating in the hostage rescue, relaxing at the team’s headquarters high atop the Kilos Shipping building.

But now that the team had a new mission, they were back. All five would fly out with Alpha Squad.

*   *   *

WHISKEY WAS READY to go by sunset.

The two Shins had come alongside
The Immaculate Perception,
one tying up in front, the other in back. Up close, they were odd-looking birds. They had outrageously angled wings, and a radar dome that stuck out from under the raised cockpit, looking like a swollen red nose. And truly, they looked more like boats with wings than airplanes that could land on water. But Shins also had an unsurpassed reputation for ruggedness. And they were a breeze to fly.

The yacht’s crew helped load Whiskey’s gear into the flying boats and then fueled the OH-6 and the Bell for their trip back to Aden. Through it all, the mega-yacht’s very famous passenger never showed her face.

Finally, as the others climbed aboard their respective planes, Nolan and Batman had one last thing to do before they went their separate ways. Standing on the mid deck gangway, Nolan gave one of the sat-phones provided by the agent to Batman, taking the other for himself. Then he opened the business envelope the agent had given him. Inside he found two index cards. Written on one was the agent’s secure phone number. Written on the other was the all-important code word they would use if and when they found the Z-box.

Nolan read it first—and suddenly froze.

Then he said the code word aloud: “Moonglow.”

Batman almost fell over. Nolan immediately felt his metallic hand digging into his arm.

Moonglow …

The exact word Batman said he’d heard from the apparition.

“Stay cool, man,” Nolan told him now, pulling Batman’s metal fingers out of his skin. “It’s just a coincidence. It means nothing.”

But Batman wasn’t so sure.

“You know what they say about coincidences,” he whispered. “‘If they don’t mean anything, how come they happen all the time?’”

9

Above the Indian Ocean

THE
SHIN-1
WAS a flying penthouse.

This was no surprise, considering the airplane’s owner was the Sultan of Oman.

A few years earlier, unhappy that his personal 767 jetliner was restricted to landing at airports, too far from his fleet of battleship-size yachts, the Sultan approached the Japanese military, which sold him two civilian versions of the Shins, making His Highness’s transition from air travel to water travel that much easier when he was in the mood. It turned out the Sultan also had many friends in Hollywood, Emma Simms being his favorite. Whenever she was in his part of the world, he gave her unlimited use of the amphibians for whatever she wanted.

Of course, the Sultan
had
to travel in style, it was in his genes. That’s why the
Shin-1
’s interior contained a hot tub, a big-screen TV, a half dozen private sleeping cabins, a deluxe galley, a full-sized bar, even a small disco—all furnished with luxurious leather seats and lambs-fur couches.

Everything but the hot tub was on rollers, though, and moved easily to the front of the plane, freeing up a significant amount of space deep in the cargo hold. This is where Alpha Squad stowed its gear.

Conversely, the plane’s pilots were definitely un-posh. Both were ex-members of the
Stormo Incursori,
the Italian Air Force’s special operations unit. Among the crème de la crème of the world’s secret operators, the SI had enjoyed a string of anti-terrorist victories around the Mediterranean over the years, few of which were ever publicized.

Nolan had no doubt the Stormos would get Alpha Squad where they had to go. The flying boat had an impressive array of navigation gear, both ground-based and GPS-slaved, plus specialty equipment such as anticollision radar and even an advanced air defense system, just in case someone wanted to take a shot at their ultra-wealthy employer.

Once at their destination, though, the Stormos’ skills would have to be extra sharp. They would have to avoid any local radar networks while Alpha reconned the target area from above—and that would be the easy part.

Landing off Gottabang would be a major challenge. The waters were known to be extremely rough, a nasty side effect of the area’s high tidal forces. It would be like coming down in a typhoon, even though the weather might be perfectly clear. One wrong move, one rogue wave, or the slightest loss of power at the wrong moment, and the big Shin would flip over, come apart, and everyone on board would be killed.

It would only get harder for Alpha once they’d set down and left the
Shin-1.
There was the question of breathable air at Gottabang. Anything that couldn’t be salvaged from the ships on the breaking beach was burned. Asbestos, PCB pipes, a galaxy of different plastics and carbon-based coatings and wire—all of it went up in flames. But because of Gottabang’s location—it was carved into the side of a mountain—the resulting smoke tended to stick around. This made the local atmosphere highly toxic even for short exposures.

For this reason, the Senegals had brought a box of small oxygen tanks and masks with them from Aden. But the tanks had an endurance of just under an hour, so whatever Alpha Squad was going to do at Gottabang, they’d have to do it in less than sixty minutes.

And there was an additional time constraint: Alpha had to complete their recon of the site while still under the cover of darkness. This was especially important because in an effort to keep its near-slave-labor force from escaping, the people who ran Gottabang employed a small army of thuggish Indian mercenaries, some of them veterans of the brutal wars in Kashmir and Sri Lanka. These people were well armed with armored cars and technicals, and possibly an armed helicopter or two. They had to be avoided at all cost.