The Pirate Hunters

Bloody Piracy!

The French patrol copters tried hailing the Danish cargo carrier
Dolphin
, but to no avail.

When the helicopter reached the
Dolphin
, it found the vessel still afloat but obviously not under control. Three armed crewmen rappelled down to the ship. One of them lost his footing and fell. Pulling himself to his feet he realized to his horror that the slick substance covering the deck was blood. Walking more carefully now, he and the other French sailors searched high and low but could find no sign of the ship’s crew.

The cargo of cheap furniture and electronics was intact. There was a large empty space in the hold, as if
something
had been taken. Also, the ship’s bridge had been stripped of its GPS system, its satellite phones, its fax machine and its weather computer.

After the men finished their fruitless, dispiriting search they returned to the helicopter and flew back to their ship in dazed silence. The French had been doing anti-pirate duty in these waters for more than a year, and while they’d seen their share of incidents, those incidents were
always
just hijacking attempts—not willful killings or the intentional sinking of ships.

In just one night, the pirate problem in the Gulf of Aden had become a lot more dangerous.

•
FORGE BOOKS BY MACK MALONEY
•

The Pirate Hunters
Operation Caribe
(Pirate Hunters 2) coming in 2011

For a free Pirate Hunters patch,
visit
www.mackmaloney.com
.

Mack Maloney

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
New York

NOTE:
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE PIRATE HUNTERS

Copyright © 2010 by Mack Maloney

All rights reserved.

Edited by James Frenkel

A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Forge
^®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-6521-7

First Edition: May 2010

Printed in the United States of America

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For brave soldiers everywhere

Many thanks to Jim Frenkel, Dominick Abel, Peter Calandra, Sgt. David Graves, Captain Randy Lynch, Walt Boyne, Phil Motoike, J. L. Brown, Tom Howley, Joe Kelleher, Rod Webber, Doug Bolick, Larry Stone, Sgt. Luke Hartmetz, Brian Malone, “Snake” Jackson, Dmitry and Oleg Gurtovoy, Clancy Miller, Jim Cook, John Daniels, Bill Kellan, Jack Shane, Buzz Summers, Gil Gillis, James Beam, Sgt. Tony Pluger, Gene Smith, Chip Bruynell, Mark Conley, Bob Messia, Seth Lerner, Ed Chapman, George Ebersole, Ron Elkin, Steve Minar, Richard Kennedy, Sr., Robert Buonfiglio, and especially, Doug Newman. Very special thanks to my wife, Doreen.

Tora Bora
December 16, 2001
0700 hours

THREE SMALL FLAGS
flew above Team Whiskey’s base camp.

One bore the insignia of the New York City Police Department; another, the Fire Department of New York. The third was the American flag. They fluttered in the stiff breeze blowing down from the nearby mountains, their makeshift flagpoles bending but not breaking in the cold Afghani wind.

Huddled inside a tent nearby was Delta Force Unit 606, code-named Team Whiskey. They were wearing oxygen masks and struggling to keep warm.

Their tiny camp was situated about 500 feet up the side of Hill 3434A. In the valley below, three T-55 tanks belonging to the Eastern Alliance were lazily firing at al Qaeda positions on the opposite side of the next mountain over. A half-mile to the north, another squad of Delta operators, Team India, was climbing Hill 3438 in a convoy of lime-green Toyota pickups. Two larger trucks carrying more Eastern Alliance fighters trailed behind.

High above them all, a B-52 Stratofortress circled endlessly, leaving doughnut-ring contrails across the blue winter sky.

Team Whiskey, one of the most experienced Delta Force units in the Afghanistan theater, was part of the final push in the two-week battle to destroy the nearby al Qaeda stronghold at Tora Bora.

Yet they remained in place, crowded together in their Black Diamond mountain tent, sucking in oxygen and waiting.

THEY WERE TYPICAL
Delta, tough guys with comic-book names—Twitch, Batman, Crash, Gunner and Snake. They were a tight-knit group, closer than brothers and unrelenting in their dedication to team and country. They’d fought together in Croatia and Kosovo, and in the rout of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan a month earlier. They’d made a dozen forays into Tora Bora in the past two weeks, performing behind-the-lines interdiction raids and guiding in air-support missions.

But today, the fifteenth day of the battle, they were sitting tight, waiting for a local contact code-named “Real Deal.”
His
nickname was a little dubious, because like most of the Eastern Alliance fighters, he was a liar, a thief, and had close relatives fighting for the enemy on the other side of the mountain.

Yet he claimed to have a piece of information so explosive that it would not only win the battle of Tora Bora, but could turn the whole world upside down.

REAL DEAL ARRIVED
at the base camp at 0710 hours. He was of indeterminate age, skinny and perpetually dirty. He squeezed into the tent, taking a seat among the uneasy Delta operators. He reeked of hashish.

He was dressed as they were—or more accurately, they were dressed like him. Each team member wore a mix of Afghani clothing and American-made North Face gear. They didn’t look much different from Real Deal, either. They were all bearded and unkempt, with long hair and faces darkened either by heritage or bronzing cream. This was Whiskey’s way of fitting in.

In working with Real Deal, the team was going against the conventional wisdom of how to win at Tora Bora. The Eastern Alliance
mujahedeen
, their ranks so highly touted after beating the Russians back in the 1980s, were actually more looters than soldiers. They fought ineffectively during the day and went home before nightfall, giving back any territory they’d won to the hundreds of al Qaeda fighters trapped inside the notorious ten-square-mile valley, allowing the terrorists to fight on.

That
was the dirty little secret of Tora Bora. Instead of committing conventional forces to the battle, the politicians
in Washington had decided to outsource the job to the local Afghani warlords, to avoid taking too many American casualties. But what had worked with the Northern Alliance in sweeping the Taliban from most of Afghanistan a month before was not working here with the Eastern Alliance. The problem was, from the White House on down, everyone was convinced Osama bin Laden was going to fight to the death at Tora Bora, cementing his status as a martyr. So the strategy was to use B-52s to bomb the crap out of him and then send in the Eastern Alliance and the Delta operators to look for his body. The battle plan was no more complicated than that.

But Team Whiskey thought otherwise. They believed bin Laden was a coward and would run the first chance he got. So they bought information, not from the warlords and their fighters, but from local civilians—the shopkeepers, taxi drivers, moneychangers and shepherds. People who’d done business with the al Qaeda fighters before the Americans arrived and, due to the porous frontlines, were doing business with some of them still.

This had led Whiskey to Real Deal. He drove a taxi; his father ran a spice shop. One of his uncles was a shepherd and another uncle a moneychanger, and they all lived in villages within five miles of Tora Bora. No one had an ear to the ground as much as these guys did.

For $500, Real Deal was going to lead Team Whiskey to a place they’d dubbed Looking Glass. Supposedly it was a secret tunnel that led to a blind canyon that bin Laden and his entourage would use this very morning to make their escape. Looking Glass was located on the side of Hill 3014, an unlikely place as it was far south of the current fighting. But it also made sense. While everyone was concentrating on battles to the north, the al Qaeda leadership would go out the back door to the south.

In other words, with Real Deal’s help, Team Whiskey was going to do what all the Afghani fighters and other Delta teams could not: They were going to find Osama bin Laden and kill him.

Before he got away.

MAJOR PHILLIP “SNAKE”
Nolan was Whiskey’s commanding officer. West Point, 82nd Airborne, Green Berets and now Delta, at just thirty-three years old, he’d done so many black ops, he’d lost count. Rugged and smart, with hard eyes and a jaw to match, he was nicknamed for his ability to fly below the radar, stay invisible, and get things done with a minimum of bullshit from above. Conversely, he was so photogenic that when he was a junior officer, the Army had used his image on its recruitment posters, something his team never let him forget. But in many ways, the poster-boy image fit.