The Pirate Hunters (31 page)

“When he got back to civilization, he came to believe that certain people were chasing him, thinking he had the treasure with him. Instead of going back for it, he went into hiding. This drove him a little nuts, I guess, because he also developed a powerful drug habit and a drinking problem, which added to his paranoia. By the time he made it to that boardinghouse on Jersey, he was a mess. The thing was, he was right—people
were
after him. And if he had waited just one more day to die, those people would have gotten the most important thing Dr. Stevenson now has in his possession.”

“And what is that exactly?” Nolan asked.

“A treasure map,” Conley said with a straight face.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Batman said.

Conley shook his head. “It was hidden on the faux BlackBerry along with all the other secret stuff. It’s a map of that island, and it shows where he buried this ultravaluable something-or-other.”

“And what does this have to do with us?” Nolan asked him.

“Well, how else will you know where to dig when you get there?” Conley replied.

The team members laughed, even Twitch.

“Why are you so convinced we’d want to do that?” Batman asked him.

Conley refilled his beer mug. “One reason is, Stevenson says he thinks he knows what the treasure is, and that he can get it back into the hands of the right people.”

“So?” Nolan asked.

Conley smiled. “So, in addition to giving me a finder’s fee,
he’s agreed to pay you five million to get him there and back safely.”

The team was stunned.

“Five million?” Crash said. “The doctor knew how to save his pennies.”

“Ever meet one who didn’t?” Conley asked.

“Plus, there must be something in it for him at the end of the road, too,” Batman said. “Something gy-normous.”

“I’m sure there is,” Conley replied. “But in this case, you guys are little more than taxi drivers. Get him there, help him dig for the buried treasure, and get him back. Maybe a week’s work—and you got another five million to lug around with you.”

The team was almost overwhelmed; it seemed like the big money just kept rolling in.

“But why us?” Gunner asked this time.

Conley shrugged. “The island is located in pirate-infested waters off Africa,” he said. “Stevenson needs someone he can trust, and he wants to do it quickly and quietly. You might have to work on that quiet part, but as far as getting him there and back, I think it’s doable.”

Conley replenished his beer once again.

“Besides,” he said, “what else you guys got to do?”

DR. STEVENSON FLEW
in the next morning.

He looked the part of a man of intelligence and leisure; middle-age, in good shape, with a shock of graying hair. He was dressed plainly, thank God. The team had fretted he might show up wearing a safari suit, a pith helmet, jodhpurs or worse.

They met him at the dockside bar. He was accompanied by a younger man named Squire who appeared to be hired security. His tattoos ID’d him as ex-SAS, as in Special Air Service, the elite British special ops group. A good guy to have along.

Stevenson had the map, taken from the encrypted fake BlackBerry. But he had some unsettling news for Team Whiskey.

“Once I was able to fully decrypt this, I discovered I wasn’t the first one to get into its pants,” he told them.

“Translation, please?” Crash asked.

“Someone else logged onto the device shortly before I got ahold of it,” Stevenson said. “Possibly right before the owner moved into the boardinghouse on Jersey. They might not have gotten in as deep as I did, but they were able to extract some information.”

“And that means?” Nolan asked.

“It means someone else knows about this island,” Stevenson said. “And they probably know that something extremely valuable is buried there.”

“Which means someone else might be trying to get to the treasure?” Batman asked.

Stevenson nodded solemnly. “Precisely.”

Nolan looked at the others and shrugged.

“Nothing like adding a little excitement,” he said.

THEY’D BARELY BEEN
able to resupply the DUS-7 when they set sail again.

The Senegals were still onboard. So, too, was the field gun Kilos had provided them for the
Vidynut
recovery. They put the artillery piece on a one-foot-high elevated platform with heavy-duty springs underneath and side railings usually employed as loading assists. The odd arrangement was designed to reduce the big gun’s recoil, keep its aim true, and avoid tearing up the deck—as they discovered it did during the re-taking of the
Vidynut
.

The cannonade machine was disassembled, with two of the 50-calibers put onto swivel mounts, one on either side of the work copter’s open bay, and the three others put on the DUS-7’s bridge. The ship’s helipad was reinforced and enlarged to handle helicopters even bigger than the work copter.

More ammunition was loaded aboard—finally—along with more fuel. The gas turbine was recalibrated, and the entire communication suite was updated with better GPS and worldwide sat-phone coverage.

All this was done in just one day by Kilos engineers working at the Port of Aden facility.

THEY SET SAIL
at midnight.

Slipping out among the fleets of container ships moving about the watery crossroads of the Middle East with their weapons hidden, they looked like just another coastal freighter, battered, dented and badly in need of a paint job.

Once they were under way, Nolan made the mistake of climbing up to the bridge and joining the Senegals for a drink. He was off the clock, and after what had happened in the past two weeks, he needed a break any time he could get one.

But drinking with the Senegals wasn’t like taking a shot of vodka or downing a few beers. It meant tossing back a concoction known as
mooch
, a brew of fermented apples, hops, grain alcohol and pulverized qat, the slightly hallucinogenic stimulant plant many people in North Africa chewed on a daily basis.

The first few gulps of mooch were like nirvana. The sea was calm, the sky was brilliant with stars, and the DUS-7 was moving along at almost forty knots—which was exhilarating in itself. As one of the Senegals steered the ship and stayed sober—the designated driver—Nolan and the other African sailors toasted each other and exchanged war stories. Gradually, Nolan started to relax.

Things began to go wrong about an hour into the drunk-fest. The Senegals were funny guys, with many stories about their exploits fighting as mercenaries in Africa. Nolan thought he might have laughed
too
hard, something that had never happened to him before. He got dizzy, found himself gulping for air, his face became flushed and his stomach was suddenly aching. Just about this time, the sea started rolling. The wind came up and the waves began to build. Within fifteen minutes, they found themselves in the middle of a storm not unlike the one that had preceded the battle for the
Vidynut.

And very quickly, Nolan found himself seasick. Another first.

He managed to stagger down to his cabin and collapse on
his bunk. He rocked and rolled with the ship, tossing and turning, the nonsense he’d written on his walls seeming to revolve around him, suspended in air. He prayed for the ability to hurl, yet was unable to.

This was not like him. He was embarrassed enough that the Senegals saw him turn white; he would be horrified if the other Whiskey members witnessed him in this condition.

Though it was his stomach that was twisted, it was really his head that didn’t feel screwed on right. Not a year ago, he was going mad in the hellhole in Kuwait, digging his way out not just to escape, but to walk across Iraq, Iran and Af ghan i-stan into Pakistan to continue his pursuit for Target Number 1. Yes—less than a year ago. But it seemed more like just a few weeks.

Now he was almost a millionaire, out on the open sea, far from that windowless rat hole of a prison cell. He was eating well, living well, fighting well, and developing a reputation that could bring him millions of dollars more.

Yet it just didn’t seem right.

There were things missing. Things he’d left behind, back in his old life. People and things.

He sat up straight in his bunk, desperate to shake these thoughts. He’d worked on conquering his demons after getting out of Kuwait, and at the moment vastly appreciated the mall-cop job for easing the transition. He’d won a major internal victory by flying the work copter that night over the Talua Tangs—with a little help from Twitch’s magic air. They had stomped Zeek. They had stomped the Somali pirates. They had prevented a bunch of very rich gangsters from being poisoned to death. And more millions would soon be theirs.

But still, he was feeling empty. Why?

Showing physical weakness was one thing—displaying any further mental issues would be hard to come back from.

He had to get back up on deck.

Climbing the ladder was rough. The ship seemed to be going one way every time he started going the other. At one point, it felt as if the
Dustboat
was turning completely over, that the sea would come rushing in and that would be the end of him.
But he blinked his eyes, and everything became more or less level again.

Somehow he made it to the main deck and was able to look out on the raging waters of the Indian Ocean. The waves were so high, their spray looked like tsunamis. There was so much water going back and forth, it was like the lights around him were melting and flowing into one. It was almost psychedelic. He was immediately soaked to the skin.

But then something caught his eye. Not on the deck, but on the water, beyond the hellish waves. First, it was just a yellow light. Then he saw a green one, than a red one. They were all dull, barely visible, maybe 1,000 feet off the port side.

It was another vessel—a container ship, heading north, painted mostly black with a white bridge. It looked weirdly empty for some reason, like no one was steering it. Like it was devoid of any human life or control.

Could it be?

Suddenly, Nolan felt 100-percent sober. He ran up to the bridge, bursting in and surprising the still-jovial Senegals. He retrieved the bridge’s pair of powerful nightscope binoculars and ran back out to the railing.

He pointed the spyglasses at the ship and studied it up and down, bow to stern, with his good eye.

Could it be?

He ran to the back of the DUS-7 and focused on the container ship’s stern as it disappeared into the night. He
had
to see its name.

It seemed like it took forever, trying to focus the scope for his one eye, looking through the water and spray and the waves. He finally got the binoculars to focus, though, and he was stunned by what he saw. The ship’s name was the
Dutch Cloud
.

The ghost ship Bebe had told him about.

He ran back up to the bridge, his heart on fire. He asked the Senegals if they’d also seen the name of the ship.

As one, all of them replied: “What ship?”

NOLAN SPENT THE
rest of the night up on the bridge, scanning the sea-surface radar, hoping the phantom ship would reappear. Five hours of searching produced nothing, though. He monitored the radio all night, too, trying to pick up any stray transmissions. Again, he came up empty.

He finally fell asleep on a cot on the bridge and was awakened by the rays of the morning sun streaming in the window. The bad weather had passed, and Gunner was standing over him with a pot of coffee.

“Breakfast of champions,” Gunner said, pouring him a cup.

Nolan got to his feet. His head was pounding, but at least it wasn’t spinning anymore. The Senegals offered their apologies for causing his condition, but he waved them away.

“Ma faute,”
he told them in their native French. “My fault.”

His thoughts went back to the craziness on the deck just a few hours before. It didn’t seem real to him now; it was more like a dream. Had the storm been that big—or had it just been a squall? Had the fermented apples gotten to him—or was it the qat? Had he just fallen asleep here on the bridge and imagined the whole thing?

He rubbed the fog from his eye and checked their position on the control panel. Despite having passed through the storm, they were still making good time. They were already 500 miles out from Aden and just a little more than a day’s sail from the spot where the mystery island was supposed to be.

Their course was taking them right through waters most frequented by Somali pirates, but Gunner and the Senegals were already joking about it.

“Let them try to attack us,” Gunner was saying, just itching to use the artillery piece again. “They’ll wish they stuck to chasing zebras.”

THEY SAILED ALL
that day and into the night with no problems. The seas stayed calm and the steady wind helped push them closer and closer to their destination.

The team spent most of their time in the galley, playing endless rounds of poker and drinking coffee, sleeping only in two-or three-hour shifts.

About ten-thirty the next morning, Nolan had just won a big hand when one of the Senegals came down to interrupt the never-ending card game. He’d spotted something up ahead.

It was not a phanton container ship. Rather it was a much smaller boat, a half-mile off their port bow. It was about the size of the DUS-7, but of much more modern design. It looked like a research vessel, all white with lots of antennas and satellite dishes poking out of the top. The problem was, it was obviously drifting.

Within five minutes, they had pulled up close to the vessel and the Senegals had caught it with a grappling hook. Nolan and Crash went over and climbed up to the bridge, where they discovered two crewmembers slumped over the controls—both shot in the head.

They went below and made their way through several cabins packed with digging utensils. Shovels. Picks. Buckets. Tarps.

“Maybe an archeology team,” Nolan said, scanning the stuff.

They moved into the galley, and here they found the ship’s passengers. Five white men, steroid-pumped muscles, dressed in black, with empty shoulder holsters—and powdery noses. Each had two bullets in his head.