Pirate Alley: A Novel (7 page)

Mustafa walked out to the port wing of the bridge and looked aft. Men were climbing from a skiff up ropes attached to grappling hooks. There were only two men left in the skiff. They secured a rope to a machine gun on a tripod, and the men on deck hauled it up. The last rope went around a box of ammo. When gun and ammo were aboard, the last two men on the skiff abandoned it and began climbing hand over hand up the ropes.

Mustafa walked across the bridge to the other side, ignoring the dead and wounded men lying there. He merely walked around them without a glance.

On the starboard side was another skiff, with only three men in it tying up boxes of RPG launchers and ammo. Mustafa’s empty skiff was drifting about a hundred yards from the ship. He waited until the men in the skiff alongside were climbing the ropes and the skiff was drifting away before he turned and came back toward the center of the bridge.

“Captain Penney?”

“Yes.”

“Get your ship under way. All ahead one third.” Mustafa had a thick accent, but Penney was used to heavy accents and had no trouble understanding him. He reached for the engine controls and advanced them.

“Set course one-eight-zero.”

Penney glanced at the helmsman. “Medium rate of turn starboard. Steady up one-eight-zero.” Without getting up from the floor, the sailor used one hand to turn the indicator knob. The engines responded. It took perhaps ten seconds for the screws to bite and the ship’s head to begin swinging.

“You are going to talk to the crew and passengers on the ship’s loudspeakers,” Mustafa said, eyeing Penney. He held out a piece of paper. It had been folded into quarters and was damp. “You will say what is on the paper. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Penney unfolded the paper and began reading. The words were all in caps and legible, although the sentences appeared to be written by someone who wasn’t familiar with English syntax.

When Penney didn’t immediately respond, Mustafa pointed his rifle at the helmsman and pulled the trigger. One shot. In the head. The man’s head literally exploded.

Mustafa nudged Penney with the barrel of the rifle. “You steer. And talk.”

The dead helmsman was an Englishman from the Midlands who had been going to sea on merchant ships since he was eighteen. Now he was dead, at the age of thirty-nine. His name was Harry Hamm.

Mustafa nudged Penney again.

Looking at his dead and injured bridge team, the captain was past caring. “Shoot and be damned,” he said.

Mustafa spoke into his ear. “I kill you. I kill all them. All. I don’t care. Four boats of my men dead. In the sea. We live between life and death. For us, this only way. I kill as many as I want. Even you. You want to see them die? I shoot those two over there if you want. You want? We put you in water with my men, for the fish.”

Arch Penney watched the compass heading come slowly around. When it read due south, he zeroed out the rate indicator. He didn’t lead it enough. The compass settled on 185. Without conscious thought, he used a very slow turn rate to bring her back to 180.

Two more gunmen came in, and Mustafa gestured at the corpses. Without a word, the men picked them up, carried them to the side of the bridge, and threw them over. When the dead were gone, they picked up the wounded and threw them into the sea.

“No,” one of the bridge team screamed. They shot him in the stomach and threw him over, too.

*   *   *

Irene and Suzanne were sitting side by side, shoulder to shoulder, when the first pirate came in. He was dressed in dirty slacks, a pullover shirt, and tennis shoes. He carried his weapon nonchalantly. He was grinning.

“A happy man,” Irene whispered.

The grin vanished and the rifle was leveled at her. The man made a gesture, his hand across his throat, and looked around. Silence. Dead silence.

Another pirate came in. He breezed by the first one, ignored the passengers and headed straight for the buffet line. The food was still in serving trays. He reached in and grabbed a handful of something and tried it. Tossed it on the deck and snatched up a pancake, which he rolled up and began eating. He grunted at the first guy, who came over and did likewise.

They surveyed the drink table and sampled the juices, jabbering to themselves, with only an occasional glance at the thirty or so passengers huddled in the passageway. One of the women was audibly sobbing, on the verge of hysteria, Suzanne thought.

As the sisters watched, other pirates came in, six total, helped themselves to food, then left. Two of them actually used dishes, but they ignored the knives and forks.

While they were eating someone whispered to the sobbing woman, trying to comfort her.

The first pirate leveled his AK and fired a short burst down the passageway at the door. The bullets went by the heads of the seated passengers. Suzanne felt the muzzle blast, a mere ten feet from her head. The roar temporarily deafened them all.

The spent shells flew out of the AK into the food trays. One wound up in a dish of fruit.

A woman screamed. It was the woman who had been on the edge of hysteria. The pirates ignored her. They looked at the brass cartridge in the fruit dish and laughed.

The loudspeaker came to life with almost no warning. “This is the captain speaking. Our ship has been captured by pirates.” There was a pause as Penney converted the tortured text into real English. “You will obey every order,” he continued, his voice tired and flat, “or they will kill you. Obey orders and everyone will live. Disobey them and many of us will die.”

He paused again, cleared his throat and resumed speaking. “The on-duty crew members will remain at their work stations. Cooks will continue with food preparation. Engineers will remain in the engineering spaces. Off-duty crew members will stay in their quarters. All passengers will return to their staterooms and remain there until summoned for meals. That is all.”

The loudspeaker fell silent. Even the sobbing woman was silent.

Irene and Suzanne looked at each other, then at their fellow passengers, one of whom was shaking and talking soundlessly to himself, then finally at the pirates stuffing food into their mouths and looking at them.

Suzanne levered herself erect, grabbed her sister’s elbow. “Come on.”

The pirates watched and chewed and swallowed. They eyed the watches and jewelry—some of the women still had their diamond earrings and gold and silver bracelets on—but made no move to touch or grab.

Both women seized their purses, then joined the queue of people shuffling forward toward the elevators and passageways that would take them to their staterooms.

*   *   *

When they reached their stateroom, Benny and Sarah Cohen found tiny bits of glass all over the floor and furniture. The gentle sea breeze through the shot-up sliding door and windows seemed benign; it was a nice day.

Silently Sarah began cleaning up the mess so they would have a place to sit and sleep. Benny used a handkerchief to brush off the seat of the chair at the small desk, then sat on it and used a sleeve to clean off the surface of the desk. From his small leather travel case he extracted their passports. Israeli passports.

Benny Cohen sat staring at the covers. He could throw them overboard, of course. But every computer on this ship, and no doubt a dozen printed lists, listed his and Sarah’s passport details and their nationality.

Hell, if these pirates were Muslim fanatics, they wouldn’t need passports or computers. One look at his and Sarah’s names on a passenger list would be enough to get them killed.

He had been just a boy when his parents had escaped Europe after the war and wound up in Israel, penniless and half-starved. His father had died in the War of Independence.

Benny remembered him, young, skinny as a rail, with a mop of black hair and an Enfield rifle hanging from his shoulder with a sling. His face was indistinct, but the hair and rifle were right there when Benny thought of him.

He and Sarah had lost two sons in the 1973 war. One was in the infantry and the other was a tanker. The day they mobilized was a horrific frenzy; then they were gone. Never to return. One of them, Jesse, left a fiancée.

If only he had gotten her pregnant!

Benny felt Sarah’s hands on his shoulders. He looked up at the mirror above the desk and saw the reflection of her wonderful face, framed by gray hair. She glanced at the passports in his hand and knew what he had been thinking without a word being spoken. Her hands tightened on his shoulders and a trace of a smile crept across her face as she gazed at his reflection in the mirror.

*   *   *

Heinrich Beck vomited his breakfast into the toilet in his small cabin the instant he reached it. He turned on the sink tap experimentally and found he still had water, so he rinsed out his mouth and washed his face, then sat on his bed.

His stateroom didn’t have a balcony or sliding glass door, merely a porthole, perhaps ten feet above the surface of the ocean. It was intact.

Beck took some deep breaths and sat silently looking at nothing in particular until he was sure his stomach would behave. He was a veteran of the East German Stasi, the most feared secret police organization on the planet until it fell apart in the collapse of Communism. Heinrich Beck’s Stasi résumé was a secret, one he didn’t share with anyone.

His specialty was interrogations. He had learned from experts and enjoyed the work. Inflicting pain on others was one of life’s grandest pleasures.

Hadn’t done any of that for over twenty-five years, though. These days Heinrich Beck made a living smuggling cocaine. He had two kilos of the stuff hidden in the air ducts leading into and out of this cabin, perfectly safe from any cursory search by a curious maid or lazy policeman.

Now Heinrich Beck sat assessing his chances of getting to Doha and delivering the coke. What would the pirates do to him if they found the stuff? Confiscate it, obviously, but he doubted they would kill him. He would deny he knew anything about it, claim a crewman must have hidden it in his cabin.

He thought about how the denial would go.

Yes, he could pull it off with these people, he thought. With Herman Stehle, who owned the coke and had entrusted him to deliver it, loss of the drugs would be a different story. Stehle had the money and contacts to make it in the international narcotics trade, perhaps the most lucrative and homicidal on the planet. Beck certainly didn’t. Stehle gave him the stuff and told him who to deliver it to. Beck was merely a mule; he didn’t even see the money.

He had done a half dozen deliveries for Stehle, most to the Mideast, two to China.

Innocence was slippery stuff. Dozens of people had tried it on Heinrich Beck, and he remembered how it was with those who actually were not guilty of the crimes of which they were accused, how they acted, the looks on their faces, the perspiration on their skin, the smell of them. They weren’t truly innocent, of course—no one is innocent—but merely not guilty.

He wondered if Stehle would believe him if he said that pirates stole the stuff.

These pirates. Beck had seen them swagger around with their weapons, shooting here and there, enjoying themselves hugely. He hadn’t seen them kill anyone, but doubtlessly they could and would if the spirit moved them. Bang. Watch the blood splatter and the look on the victim’s face as he died. Smell the fear.

It would give the shooter such a sense of power. Almost orgasmic.

Beck felt warm as he thought about it.

Power. The power of life and death.

Heinrich Beck lit a cigarette and sat watching the smoke rise toward the return duct where the coke was stashed. It swirled a little and dissipated, but the duct sucked it up nonetheless.

CHAPTER
FOUR

The capture of a cruise ship by Somali pirates was headline news worldwide, or would be when Europe and America woke up. The Pentagon received the Flash message from Task Force 151 so knew of it first. The bald facts went from the Pentagon’s duty officers to the White House night staff and assorted other government agencies within minutes.

Jake Grafton was sound asleep at home when he received a call from the CIA situation room. Half awake, he grunted three or four times as he tried to absorb the story.

“The director wants to meet with you and the other department heads at seven thirty.”

“Fine,” Jake said and hung up.

His wife, Callie, had awakened. The incident would certainly not be a secret long, he knew, so he said, “Task Force 151 reports Somali pirates have captured a cruise ship in the Gulf of Aden. About five hundred passengers and three hundred fifty crewmen.”

Callie came wide awake. “Isn’t Toad Tarkington in command of that task force?”

“Yes.”

Toad had served as Jake’s aide for years when Jake was on active duty in the navy. After Jake retired, Toad went on to various assignments and had obviously impressed his superiors with his competence. Now he was a two-star admiral.

Jake knew Toad had probably had a damn rough day in the Indian Ocean, and, if anything, tomorrow was going to be worse. Every politician from Washington to Doha, Beijing and Tokyo was going to tell Tarkington what he had done wrong. Being second-guessed went with the job. Jake forgot about Toad and began mulling the probable reaction of those same politicians after they stopped grousing and started thinking.

He climbed from the bed and padded into the kitchen, where he fired off the coffeepot. Two in the morning, according to the clock in the microwave. As the coffee was brewing, he turned on the television.

Within sixty seconds Fox News had it.
News Flash
. He flipped channels. Soon all the cable news networks were giving the story a big play. By the time the coffee was ready, one news channel was airing a photo of the ship,
Sultan of the Seas,
probably one the producer had just downloaded from the Internet.

Callie came in wearing a robe over her pajamas, and together they watched the idiot tube as they sipped hot coffee. The news organizations didn’t have any more details, just the facts as announced by the Pentagon, so the talking heads began speculating. They wondered how much money the pirates would demand as ransom.