Black Site (3 page)

The American turned away again. His running footsteps faded down the hall.

*   *   *

Captain Thor Thomasson walked past the huge containers on the main deck. Two pirates flanked him and held his arms and waved rifle muzzles up in his face to spur him forward. He wore his formal coat buttoned up, held his head high and his nose up, kept a proud chin. He could hear his officers behind him as they were pushed along at gunpoint as well.

He was angry at these filthy brigands, of course. Considered them the vermin of the sea, the absolute scourge of a profession of great honor and nobility. But as angry as he was at these poorly dressed, sweat-dripping black and Arab men around him, he was incalculably more furious at that son-of-a-bitch American alcoholic security officer who should already have been on his satellite phone wiring funds to these cretins’ Nairobi bank accounts.

Where the hell was that drunkard Raynor?

Captain Thomasson was led in front of the leader of the pirates and shoved down to his knees, which was a shock to the Norwegian mariner. He was screamed at in French and English and Somali and Arabic. Spit flew from the young pirate leader’s mouth as he shouted and yelled and waved his gun around in wild arcs.

Thomasson had endured hijackings before, but this was clearly different. These men were whipped into a fierce rage, and they almost looked as if they
wanted
to kill.

*   *   *

Kolt Raynor ran down the stairs to B Deck, turned the corner, and all but crashed into two surprised pirates. Both men raised their rifles at him quickly. He could tell some drug was amping up their brains. Their jerking and ticlike movements were hard to judge. He put his hands out, palms forward, waist high.

And he smiled as he spoke. “Francais? Parlez vouz Francais mes amis?”

One of the men nodded and said he
did
speak French.

“Tres bien. Je suis avec l’ societe de transport Jorgensen. Tu va bien.”

Everything is okay,
he assured them. He spoke politely and calmly.

In French he continued, “I have the authority to offer you payment for our safe passage. Look, my friends, I will show you my credentials.”

Kolt’s right hand slowly began to reach into his waistband. The men had spread apart warily, one on each side of the gangway, and each kept his AK on his chest. They had been somewhat calmed by Kolt’s words and his demeanor, but they were no amateurs, and they were no fools. As his right hand lowered to his side one of the men shouted at him to freeze.

Raynor’s hand movement transitioned from slow and cautious to a whipping blur. He reached behind his back as he took a quick sidestep to his right. His hand appeared, and before either pirate could react, he shot the man on his left through the right eye. The second man jolted in shock, began to squeeze the trigger of his AK-47, but two rounds to the neck short-circuited his central nervous system and his finger relaxed.

Kolt returned the hot pistol to the small of his back, stepped forward, and gently took the rifle from the second dead man’s hands even before his body hit the metal deck. This rifle he slung over his shoulder. He lifted the identical AK from the ground next to the first pirate, opened the collapsed wire stock with a snap, and continued walking toward the bow side of the superstructure.

*   *   *

“Go see what that was!” Abdiwali shouted to two of his men, and they started off at a run toward the ship’s superstructure. Captain Thomasson remained on his knees, the hot metal burning his white skin through his pressed trousers. His fellow officers were lined up on their knees alongside him. The Filipinos stood behind the Norwegians. All were terrified by the erratic actions of their captors.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

Thomasson had offered money, money to be wired anywhere in the world. The pirate leader had laughed at him and told him they would kill them all and take their cargo and their boat and earn ten times the money his company would be willing to pay for their miserable lives.

Just then cracking Kalashnikov fire echoed off the large wall of containers behind them. The origins of the noise were hard to pinpoint. All the pirates, and all the captured crew, looked up at the superstructure. There, a lone man stood on B Deck, fifty yards away, holding an assault rifle over the scene.

Thomasson squinted in the glare of the sun off the windows of the superstructure. Finally he said, “Raynor?”

THREE

Kolt Raynor had just killed four men at close range, two with the pistol, and two more with a “borrowed” Kalashnikov. It had been easy. But now, at a distance, he found holding the sights on a small target extremely difficult. The ship rocked gently from side to side, Raynor had not trained with a rifle in years, and his physical condition had deteriorated to the extent that he was already winded from running a short distance and climbing a few flights of stairs.

And, there was no question in his mind, he was legally drunk.

But what he lacked in capability, he attempted to make up for in bluster.

He shouted at the attackers below him. “I’ve killed four of you already! Turn around and get back on your boats or I’ll kill you all!”

The leader of the pirates screamed back at him. “I will shoot the captain!” Abdiwali grabbed Thomasson by the pressed and starched collar of his uniform and pulled him up to his feet. Held the AK to the officer’s neck and gripped him close, using the thick man for cover.

The punishing sun scalded Kolt’s face. He squinted, sighted carefully across the top of his AK. The weapon rocked back and forth in his hands. Raynor was furious with himself for drinking on duty. At the same time, he desperately wanted a tall shot of bourbon to help calm his nerves. He worried about his abilities, and he worried about the weapon in his hands. Raynor had not sighted this weapon—he didn’t know how accurate it was even in the hands of a stone-cold-sober shooter.

Still, it was only fifty yards. In his military service Raynor had routinely popped head-sized targets with iron sights at four times the distance. He told himself that fifty lousy yards, even buzzed and firing an unfamiliar weapon, would be no problem. He tightened his aim on the pirate’s forehead, pushed the captain out of his mind, slowly and confidently pressed the trigger.

Boom. The weapon’s recoil slammed the stock against his shoulder, and in his alcohol-addled state his knees were wobbly. It took him a long moment to refocus downrange.

The pirate leader remained standing.

Captain Thor Thomasson fell to the deck. He writhed on the ground, clutching his shoulder.

“Oh shit,” Raynor mumbled.

Abdiwali screamed, “What is wrong with you? Are you crazy? I will kill everyone!” Quickly the pirates made human shields of all the ship’s officers, and Abdiwali pulled the injured Captain Thomasson back to his feet and held him between the superstructure and himself.

Blood ran down the blue sleeve of the captain’s uniform.

Kolt Raynor slowly lowered his weapon, dropped it to the deck, and raised his hands.

*   *   *

Abdiwali hit the wounded captain on the head over and over with the wooden stock of his gun while he waited for his men to bring the bearded man down from B Deck. He’d lost four men today, but he would take twenty-five lives as repayment. Then he and his surviving men would ransack the ship, and spend some time searching for loot. Then they would climb back on their boats and speed toward the coast before NATO ships or helicopters arrived.

This would be a fun afternoon, and Abdiwali would get it started by making the bearded infidel now approaching beg for his wretched life.

“Abdiwali!” shouted one of the pirates pushing him along. “He is American! He had Mustafa’s rifle, and he had a pistol hidden in his pants.” The pirate shoved the American down onto the hot deck at his leader’s feet. The man went down on his hands and knees, began spewing vomit, ejecting sick bile on the pirate’s sandals and bare legs.

First Abdiwali leaped back and screamed with anger. Then he raged forward, used the butt of his rifle to pound the top of the man’s head. The two pirates flanking the disgusting creature followed suit, and all three began hitting him with their rifles as he rolled on the deck in his own effluence.

When they slowed their attack he crawled back up to his hands and knees. The man on his left raised his gun high to rain one last powerful blow down on his back. Suddenly the cowering American leaped up toward the descending rifle, spun his back to the pirate’s chest, and grasped the AK as it swept down. The sling was around the Somali’s neck—the American pulled the gun in front of him and yanked the choking pirate off his feet, spinning him around to his back and holding him off the ground while he kicked and gagged, strangling the pirate with the pirate’s own rifle’s sling.

Abdiwali frantically tried to turn his weapon back around from its butt-forward position, but the puke-covered infidel was too fast. The American stepped closer, still using the sling to choke the rifle’s owner. The barrel of the AK pressed against Abdiwali’s forehead, and it shoved him backward to the bow’s railing. One more strong push and Abdiwali would fall two stories to the water below.

The Somali pirate leader dropped his weapon and raised his hands quickly.

*   *   *

All the pirates were shouting now, save for the leader, who looked wide-eyed at the barrel pressed just above his eyes, and the one who hung by his neck off Kolt’s back. Raynor could not see the other men, but their screams and shouts indicated their location behind him and, more important, their indecision.

Kolt looked at the man at the end of his gun barrel.

“If you say anything, anything at all, other than ‘Get back in the boats,’ I will blow the top of your head out to sea!”

The Somali hesitated, started to speak, but Kolt cut him off.

“Remember,
anything
but ‘Get back in the boats,’ and you are fish food, asshole!”

The pirate leader’s forehead sweat dripped on the blued gun barrel. A fat drop trailed down past the front sight. The kicking of the strangling man on Raynor’s back caused the rifle to jerk back and forth, and the sweat dripped off the underside of the barrel with the motion.

Abdiwali moved his eyes down the barrel, past the American’s sunburned hands and arms, to his face. Into his eyes. They were watery and bloodshot, and Abdiwali was certain he could smell the sickly sweet scent of liquor in the rancid stench of bile on the man’s face and clothes.

After a moment he said, in English and then Somali, “Get back in the boats!”

Kolt stepped back and raised the rifle just enough to let the choking man behind him drop to the hot deck, where he gasped for air like a fish pulled from the hot green waters.

The pirates climbed back over the side. They kept their weapons with them, but Kolt did not take his rifle’s sights off of their leader’s forehead until all of his men were back on the speedboats two stories below. Then, without a word, Raynor pushed Abdiwali to the railing, and he went over. Adroitly he climbed down the rope ladder they’d used for their ascent, and a wooden skiff pulled forward to meet him at the waterline.

The three boats began to accelerate away from the ship, the officers on the deck scrambled to attend to their wounded captain, some of the deckhands came forward to cheer and pat Raynor on the back, but he pushed them back, told them to run. They did not understand, grew more confused when the vomit-covered security man went down onto his knees under the railing, then lay prone with the pirate’s rifle in front of him.

The boats were leaving. Why was he still concentrating on them?

Captain Thomasson lay nearby, moaning in shock and pain.

The blade sight of Kolt’s AK weaved in front of him. He concentrated on the sight as best he could, but switched focus from time to time to the pirate leader in the middle boat. At one hundred yards, just as Raynor expected, the boat slowed and turned broadside of the cargo ship. Kolt concentrated all his diminished faculties on the front sight post now, tried to line it up with the jet-black man standing in the little boat. He ignored the waffle-patterned deck’s heat as it reddened his skin, and he watched Abdiwali lift a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in the air in front of him, heft it to his shoulder, and point it at the ship.

Kolt knew the pirate could not sink the huge freighter with a few lousy RPGs, but he could kill crewmen and damage the vessel and cargo. Kolt did his best to aim for the distant man’s head, thought he had him lined up in the sights, and fired a single round.

The pirate did not move, just held the RPG at the ready and took aim himself.

Kolt fired another round.

Another miss.

He could tell the Somali was about to let his rocket fly.

“To hell with this,” said Kolt, flipping the selector switch to full-auto fire. He sighted perfunctorily on the speedboat and let it rip. Five, ten, twenty, twenty-five rounds blasted forth. The pirate leader lurched back, the RPG launcher raised, and a rocket streaked high into the air and flew harmlessly over the ship ahead of a white smoke trail.

The Somali pirate leader fell back into the water with the metal launcher still in his grasp. All but one of the other pirates on board the skiff jerked and spasmed and dropped dead along with him. Collateral damage. The sole survivor crawled low to the outboard motor and turned his splintered and bullet-ridden boat away. The other two speedboats left their leader and the others behind as they raced back to the safety of the coast.

Kolt climbed back up to his feet, staggered again a moment, and suffered a short bout of dry heaves. Captain Thomasson was being tended to by a ship’s officer with a medical kit. The white-haired Norwegian captain stared angrily at the American while prostrate on the hot deck.

“You fool! Typical American cowboy! We have insurance to deal with these matters. They would have been reasonable if you had just offered them the money!”

Kolt turned away and toward the first officer. “Get the crew to throw the bodies and the guns overboard. Then I want you to show me how fast this boat will go,” Raynor said. “I’ll be in my room.”