The Pirate Hunters (23 page)

AN HOUR LATER
, the team was gathered back in the mess hall.

Outside, the sea was beginning to swell and the wind was growing stronger. The coffee cups were starting to rattle in the ship’s galley.

Several things had happened in the past hour. They’d managed to tie down the artillery piece with chains, ropes and electrical wire to a spot near the front of the ship. The delivery also included forty-eight rounds of high-explosive artillery shells. The team stored them in an empty lifeboat locker nearby.

The Indian government had given them access to a classified Indian Navy Web site where they were able to get a GPS reading on the
Vidynut
. With their dual propulsion systems working overtime, they were now within seventy-five miles of the hijacked warship and still closing fast.

Most important, Team Whiskey had been able to download blueprints of the
Vidynut
, which they were studying now, even as the Indian Ocean outside was sounding a little more agitated.

The
Vidynut
was, indeed, futuristic in almost every respect.
Aside from its virtually complete automation, the ship itself looked like it was going 100 knots even when it was standing still. It was all curves and smoothed-out right angles; anything that could be flared on the drawing board had been. It was also stuffed with a lot of sophisticated electronics as well as extensive communications and radar arrays. Though the only weapon visible above deck was a four-inch naval gun on the bow, belowdecks there were six automated missile launchers: four for short-range attacks and two for long-range engagements. The
Vidynut
could sink a ship four times its size from more than fifty miles away.

Its superstructure was three levels high, beginning about one-third of the way down from the bow, and took up the middle of the ship. The bridge was located at the top of the superstructure in a swept-back, all-glass bubble, its roof festooned with antennas and spinning radar dishes. The ship’s stern was devoted to holding the long-range missiles themselves, plus an elaborate, almost stylish-looking exhaust stack that would have seemed at home on a Klingon warship. The deck was so cluttered there was no way the team could ever land their work copter on the hijacked missile boat.

Not that they would have to. After tossing around many ideas for an hour or so, the team had come up with a simple—make that
very
simple—plan to recover the ship and collect their two million dollars. And it was the blueprints that gave them the idea.

Assuming they were able to catch up to the
Vidynut
, their first objective would be to get as close to the warship as possible without arousing the pirates’ suspicion. Because the DUS-7 was such an old ship, they were hoping the hijackers would not suspect them of being anything other than a rust-bucket freighter moving through the Indian Ocean.

Once they were within range of the
Vidynut
, though, they would fire one shell from the M102 artillery piece, hoping for a hit on the ship’s propellers, which—due to the craft’s ultra-modern, shallow-hull design—were just a couple of feet below the water line. With its props disabled, the ship would be dead in the water.

And that was it. If the ship had no means of propulsion, it couldn’t get to Africa. If it couldn’t get to Africa, NATO couldn’t sink it.

The
Dustboat
would just sit a safe distance away, snipe at the pirates if they showed their faces, but basically wait them out. Conley had told them the Indian ship had only about a three-day supply of food and water. Soon the pirates would get hungry, thirsty and hot. Eventually, they’d crack.

The plan fit perfectly with the team’s own supply situation. While they were extremely low on M4 and 50-caliber ammunition, they had plenty of supplies and now the artillery piece. It was an incredibly simple way to make a cool two million.

But it was not to be. Because just moments after putting the finishing touches on the idea, just as they heard the wind outside getting louder and felt the ship’s rocking get a little rougher, one of the Senegals came down from the bridge holding the latest weather report. A huge complication had just appeared on the horizon.

A storm was blowing up from the Cape of Good Hope, aiming right for the middle of the Indian Ocean. With heavy rains, high winds and particularly high seas, the gale was already going full force, and the
Vidynut
and the DUS-7 were heading right for it.

But that was not the problem. The problem was, the DUS-7 was still some seventy-five miles behind the
Vidynut
, meaning they would be hit by the full force of the typhoon’s 100-knot winds, which would probably blow it farther from the hijacked ship than they were now. By the time they recovered, the
Vidynut
would be that much closer to Somali territorial waters—and they’d be so far behind, it would be almost impossible for them to make up the lost time and distance.

Batman did the calculations. When he realized their gloomy conclusion, he threw the weather report across the mess hall.

“The way this thing is blowing in,” he said angrily, “there’s no way we’re going to catch that freaking ship.”

IT WAS DARK
. It was hot. It smelled of oil, blood and urine. It was crowded and grown men were crying. The ones who were still alive, that is.

Vasu Vandar was in hell. He just hadn’t died yet.

Vandar was captain of the INS
Vidynut.
What had started out as a night of high honor, dining at the home of the president of the Maldives, had turned into a nightmare when Vandar returned to his ship to find it had been taken over by the Somali pirates and the intruders had brutally killed four of his men. Then he had to endure the humiliation of getting under way at the point of an AK-47.

Now he and most of his crew were stuffed inside the stern bilge station, a tiny compartment located at the bottom of the warship, just waiting to die. The compartment, filled with heating pipes, fuel lines and pumps for the ship’s toilets, measured just ten feet by six feet. This is where the pirates had put them—fourteen men in all, plus the bodies of those they’d killed.

There was no light in here, no food or water. The sailors were barely able to breathe. Vandar had told his men not to talk, but he could hear many of them weeping. Others were hallucinating, going mad, crying out. Vandar couldn’t blame them for that. He was going mad as well.

He knew by now that there was no way out of this. He also knew ransoming the crew was not part of the pirates’ agenda. They wanted the ship. He and his men were just complications.

Vandar also realized no help was coming. The Indian Navy’s only aircraft carrier was way up in Tokyo Bay, throwing flowers at the Japanese. The
Vidynut
was far beyond the reach of any of India’s helicopters. He also knew it was not likely the Indian government would accept another country’s direct help in saving them.

“We have had a navy for 5,000 years,” he thought glumly. “And now, when we need them, they are nowhere to be found.”

He tried to will himself to accept the cold fact that the end was near for him and his men; it was a hard thing to do. But whether they were to be shot or stabbed or just simply left in here to suffocate, Vandar couldn’t imagine them lasting much longer. The only question was why the pirates were waiting so long?

He could now hear some of the men praying, their way of spending their last moments alive. Vandar was dealing with his last breaths in a different way. When he was captured, though the pirates had searched him, they’d missed a pen he always kept his pocket. It had a tiny light attached to it to help him write in the dark when the ship was training under blackout conditions.

He was using this bare light now, and this pen, to write aimlessly on the compartment walls.

THE STORM HIT
just after 2
A.M.

The sound of the water crashing against the hull rose in volume, and soon they could feel the
Vidynut
being tossed around like a toy. This only added to the misery of the sailors jammed into the small, hot space. Some began wailing again. Vandar ordered them to quiet down, to save air. In his heart, though, he was praying the hull’s composites
would
fail, and that the ship would break up in the tempest. A death by drowning would be preferable to suffocation in an airless space, inches away from a dead man.

He was startled, then, when he heard furious pounding at the door of the compartment. It opened, and he could see three of the pirates standing in the dull light of the passageway.

They began shouting: “Captain! Captain! Who is the captain?”

Vandar froze for a moment. Why did they want him? Did this mean the killing was going to begin?

The pirates cocked their guns and appeared ready to fire into the crowded compartment.

“Who is the captain!” one yelled, aiming his weapon at those men clustered near the door. Finally Vandar called out: “I am.”

Two of the armed men crawled into the space and dragged him out. Then they shut the door and locked it once again, sealing the rest of the crewmembers inside.

The pirates dragged Vandar up to the main deck; the boat was swaying so much by now that they kept losing their grip on him. Vandar had gone through some big storms in his twenty-year career with the Indian Navy. Without even seeing it, he could tell this was one of the worst.

They reached the main deck and the gunmen forced him up onto the bridge. Here, he found two of his sailors who hadn’t been taken below. One was at the helm—a young seaman who looked like he was about to die from fright. He had a bleeding, untended wound on his arm. The other, without much more experience, was watching over the ship’s vital systems. He, too, looked extremely frightened. He was bruised and bleeding, as if he’d been pistol-whipped.

Outside, the storm was raging as if the vengeance of Vishnu had fallen upon them. The rain and wind were horrific and the waves looked as high as mountains. There were more than a dozen pirates on the bridge and they were all holding onto something, trying to stay upright as the ship was thrown all over the sea. One pirate, though, was away from the others; he was huddled in the far corner of the bridge, watching over something he’d apparently plugged into an electrical outlet.

One of the pirates walked up to Vandar, coming nose to nose with him, even though the bridge was rocking mightily. This pirate was obviously the gang’s leader. He had an enormous scar running across his neck, as if he’d had his throat slit at one point. He had few teeth and a lazy eye, and he smelled awful.

He also had a huge machete in one hand, and Vandar was terrified that this man was going to hack him to death right here.

Instead, he addressed Vandar in rough, broken English.

“Are we sinking?” he asked, his voice betraying a bit of urgency.

Vandar was so thrown by the question, he asked him to repeat it.

“Are we sinking!”
the man roared at him, raising the machete.

Vandar did a quick scan of the ship’s critical systems. He saw no red blinking lights, and no alarms were ringing. This meant, in theory at least, they weren’t in danger of going down. Not yet, anyway.

But Vandar wasn’t going to tell the pirate that. “You must release my crew so we can sail this ship properly. If not, we
will
sink.”

For this, he received the butt of the machete across his face. The blow sent him sprawling across the bridge.

“We know this is robot boat!” the gang leader screamed at him. “It goes by itself. But in this? Can it go by itself
in this
?”

“I don’t know,” Vandar told him truthfully, from the floor. The
Vidynut
had a small crew precisely because of its extensive automation, but it hadn’t yet passed its sea trials and had never gone through anything like the storm blowing outside.

“You are the captain!” the pirate screamed at him, picking him up off the deck. “Either you tell me truth or we kill the lot of you right now.”

Vandar collected himself and tried to appear calm, but it was impossible.

“What do you want to know exactly?” he asked the gunman.

“Are we sinking?” the pirate leader asked him again.

Vandar replied, “No—not yet.”

“Will we sink?”

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“How will we know if we are sinking?”

Vandar indicated the main panel of status monitors.

“If this lights up and starts making noise,” he told the pirate leader, “then it will mean we are sinking.”

The gang leader hit him again with the machete handle—this time in the stomach. Then two other pirates picked him up and prepared to drag him back to the bottom of the boat.

As this was happening, the pirate who had been sitting in the far corner of the bridge popped out of his seat.

“It is charged!” he exclaimed.

He walked over to the pirate leader and, in full view of Vandar, revealed what he’d been watching over. It was a battery for a video camera and it had been recharging, slowly as it turned out.

But now the battery was full—and this was making the pirates very happy. One handed the pirate leader a video camera.

The pirate leader turned back to Vandar and inserted the battery into the video camera like someone would put an ammo clip into a gun.

“Soon,” he hissed at Vandar, “our show will begin.”

Vandar was dragged back to the bottom deck and thrown back into the bilge station. He squeezed himself in, trying his best to stay away from where the dead bodies lay. Many of his men were wailing openly now, and he just didn’t have the heart to tell them to stop.

Instead, he just returned to his corner and resumed writing his nonsense on the wall.

He’d been out of Hell for less than five minutes.

THE
VIDYNUT
SLOWLY
sailed its way out of the storm by morning, riding out the last of the wind and surviving the final gigantic waves.

The sky cleared, and the last stars of the night came into view. Off on the eastern horizon, the first rays of dawn were poking through the remaining wisps of the storm clouds.